Tishan Hsu: Interface Remix
Museum of Contemporary Art, Toronto, Canada
September 08, 2024 – January 26, 2025

Tishan Hsu’s visionary multimedia practice has been steadily concerned with the nexus of technology and the human body. Trained as an architect and working as a “word processor” in the early 1980s, his education and early exposure to the accelerated use of software have guided his adoption of non-traditional materials, and explorations of how virtual realities and new intelligence might weigh on the human condition.

Hsu’s exhibition on Floor 3 of the museum – his first in Canada – traces his dedication to experimentation from the 1980s until the present day, reflecting his pioneering thinking, as well as focusing on metamorphosis and alienation. Interface Remix combines painting, sculpture, and installation, and includes a new site-specific work made from emergent technologies. Key works from the last five decades will be presented alongside never-before-seen paintings and sculptures from the artist’s collection.

In recent years, Hsu has come to think of the screen as a kind of “skin” or barrier between the online and physical worlds. Responding to the museum’s architecture, Hsu has created a new wallpaper specifically for MOCA that stretches and wraps into an architectural object, giving it both a rigid and supple appearance. Cast acrylic elements protrude from the work’s surface, bringing the virtual nature of digital imaging into reality. As our lives become increasingly transformed by technology, Hsu’s work continues to examine how the human experience relates to the rapidly evolving digital environment.

Tishan Hsu lives and works in New York. His recent presentations include solo exhibitions at MAMCO (Geneva) in 2024 and Secession (Vienna) in 2023, inclusion into Your Eternity, 4th Future of Today Biennale in 2023 (Beijing); The Milk of Dreams, Venice Biennale 2022; 58th Carnegie International: Is it morning for you yet? in 2022 (Pittsburgh); 13th Gwangju Biennale: Minds Rising, Spirits Turning in 2021, and Liquid Circuit, a solo exhibition at the SculptureCenter (New York) in 2020 and Hammer Museum (Los Angeles) in 2021. A new commission for the Highline (New York) is on view now.

Selected public and private collections that hold Hsu’s work include the Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York), Centre Pompidou (Paris), MAMCO (Geneva), Museum fur Moderne Kunst (Frankfurt), Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art (Los Angeles), and The Whitney Museum of American Art (New York).

more. www.moca.ca