Specimen of Suffering | te Online Lectures
Specimen of Suffering
《受难与标本》
Speakers: 许哲瑜 Hsu Che-Yu & 陈琬尹 Chen Wan-Yin
Language: Chinese (with real-time Translated Captions via Zoom)
8AM EDT (New York) / 1PM GMT (London) (*Attendees in other time zones, please convert to your local time)
This lecture moves from a mallard at Natural History Museum Rotterdam, killed after flying into a glass panel, to the Przewalski’s horses of Mongolia; from the Nazi-era attempt to breed back the extinct Tarpan, to the beasts executed at Taipei Yuan-Shan Zoo during wartime; and on to the pathological specimens held at Amsterdam’s Museum Vrolik—research the artist has pursued across moving image, writing, archival research, and near-forensic methodologies. Their works keep asking: how do specimens reconstruct memory? How do they conceal historical violence, or become monuments to their own suffering? This lecture invites us to reconsider how museums, science, and political ideology shape the stories behind these specimens. Beyond this, Hsu and Chen will also discuss the research behind their essay Suffering and the Specimen, and drawing on their own works, to trace how these histories move between fieldwork, archival material, and working method.
𓅰𓅰𓅰𓅰𓅰𓅰𓅰𓅰𓅰𓅰𓅰𓅰𓅰𓅰𓅰𓅰𓅰𓅰
SCHEDULE
Talk (60min)
Q&A (30min)
ZOOM LINK
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HIGHLIGHT
Replay: Registrants will receive a replay link valid for one month after the lecture concludes. The replay does not include the live Q&A session.
Further Resources: Registrants will have access to a Digital Reading Room for this lecture, featuring supplementary materials and references related to the lecture.
𓅰𓅰𓅰𓅰𓅰𓅰𓅰𓅰𓅰𓅰𓅰𓅰𓅰𓅰𓅰𓅰𓅰𓅰
SPEAKER BIOS
Hsu Che-Yu is an artist who lives and works in Taipei and Amsterdam. He studied at the Graduate Institute of Plastic Arts at Tainan National University of the Arts, where he received his master’s degree in 2014. He participated in several international postgraduate programs: 2019-2020 at HISK (Higher Institute for Fine Arts) in Ghent; 2020-2022 at Le Fresnoy—Studio national des arts contemporains in Tourcoing; 2022-2024 at the Rijksakademie van Beeldende Kunsten in Amsterdam. His practice includes video works, animations, VR works, and installations. A central theme is the intertwining of media, memory, and the body. Typical of his practice is his collaboration with forensic 3D scanning teams, whose technologies he transfers into artistic processes in order to renegotiate historical events, political traumas, or biographical narratives. He has been working closely with writer Chen Wan-Yin since 2014.
Chen Wan-Yin is a writer whose practice investigates the technological and biopolitical production of memory. She is a key conceptual collaborator in Hsu Che-Yu’s practice and has been shaping its research-driven artistic methodology since 2014. Together they co-authored aberrant archive 2015-2025 (dmp editions, Taipei), a publication documenting their decade-long artistic alliance examining post-martial law Taiwanese histories through moving images, text and technological reconstructions. She is currently a PhD candidate in Modern and Contemporary Art at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam.