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Director's Commentary: Rabbit 314 by Hsu Che-Yu
Hsu Che-Yu
Hsu Che-Yu (b. 1985) is an artist based in Taipei and Amsterdam. In 2022, he began his two-year art residency in Rijksakademie in Amsterdam. Hsu has solo exhibitions at ILHAM Gallery (Kuala Lumpur, 2024), Fundació Joan Miró (Barcelona, 2023), Centre d’Art Contemporain Genève (2023), Vernacular Institute (Mexico City, 2023), MOCA Taipei (2023), Kuandu Museum of Fine Arts (Taipei, 2023,2012), Taipei Fine Arts Museum (2015), SAT Society for Arts and Technology (Montreal, 2012). He has participated in Videobrasil (2023), Theater der Welt (Frankfurt, 2023), Bienal de São Paulo (2021), Seoul Mediacity Biennale (2021), Techniques of Becoming (Württembergischer Kunstverein, Stuttgart, 2021), VIDEONALE.18 (2021), Shanghai Biennale (2018, 2012), London Design Biennale (2018), Asian Art Biennial (Taichung, 2017), and film festivals IFFR International Film Festival Rotterdam (2023, 2022, 2020, 2018) and NYFF New York Film Festival (2020).
Rabbit 314, 2020. 07:17 minutes.
In her youth, Hsu Che-Yu's grandmother worked at an animal research facility. Part of her routine involved injecting rabbits with viruses to develop swine flu vaccines. A process in which rabbits served as the instruments of ecological control; their purpose was to safeguard pigs' lives. Together with his long-time collaborator, scriptwriter Chen Wan-Yin, Che-Yu secured the body of a dead rabbit from the lab. A glove puppeteer reenacts the movements of living rabbits, as imagined by humans, with the carcass.
Credits:
Artist: Hsu Che-Yu
Screenwriter: Chen Wan-Yin
Puppeteer: Kuo Chien-Fu