Tishan Hsu
recent work 2023
Secession, Vienna

Whether edifices or objects (or even the people around us) things endow human life with stability and meaning. But as theorist Byung-Chul Han has noted, “This terrestrial order is today being replaced by the digital order.” Unmoored from the physical world, we now find ourselves adrift in a sea of data and information mediated through screens and necessarily subordinated to the fleeting syntax of the binary number system—the basis of all computers, and, subsequently, most of our embodied experience. We might even ask whether we have inadvertently rendered ourselves, in Han’s words, “the material derivatives of information.”

This relationship between humans and technology has occupied artist Tishan Hsu for the better part of four decades. As he summarized in a 2021 interview: “What are we really feeling here, interacting with all this stuff? There’s this kind of cognitive, emotional, psychological resonance going on between us as this organic body, and this screen, and it is affecting us and the culture, if not the world, in deeper and deeper ways.”