musquiquiproje

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The Looty

Video installation, holographic projection,

NFT, 10 sec on loop, 2022

A lion and a marmoset fell in love. However, the size of the lion was too big, so the lion prayed to the Buddha for help. Buddha decided to turn it into the size of a marmoset and made it become the ancestor of Pekingese. The name of this work is derived from a Pekingese which was plundered to the West by the British-French alliance after the Opium War. The dog’s real name was nowhere to find; nevertheless, the British royal family gave it a new name, Looty, which precisely reflected its contradictory political roles: being a plundered loot and a survivor in a disaster at the same time. The work The Looty turns the image of Looty into a non-fungible token for remembering this event and also rethinking how new technology can change the forms of collections and visual narrative communication.

Still image of The Looty © Musquiqui Chihying

Installation view of The Vitrine © LIUSA WANG Gallery

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The Vitrine

3 channel sound installation, broken vitrines, LED light,

smoke machine, 30 min, 2022

The Chinese Museum at the Palace of Fontainebleau was established in 1867. Most of the collections were plundered by the British and French forces during the Opium War. In view of this event, these collections can be constructed in three distinct viewing experiences: the first is the moment right before the foreign invasion when the Western “Perspective Linéaire” technique was introduced to the Qing imperial court, which became an important exchange between East and West in visual history. As part of the post-invasion period, the second moment, Chinese artefacts were looted and brought to Europe, some of which were remodelled by members of the French court by incorporating Western artistic styles. This “Pastische” re-creation strips these objects of their original sculptural functions and enshrouds them with a distinctive hegemonic meaning. In the early morning of March 1, 2015, a theft incident happened again in the Chinese Museum at Fontainebleau, which marked the third moment in the contemporary context of these cultural objects. The display of colonial looted items is undergoing an important change under the current political and economic climate, highlighting the fundamental ideological problems of Western museums displaying the collections relate to colonialism. It also implies the involvement of huge political forces and the trading network under the table. Using storytelling as a medium, the sound installation The Vitrine transforms the exhibition site into a crime scene of a stolen museum, which not only provides audiences with a starting point to review the problematic Asian collection in Western institutions, but also responds to the critic Ariella Azoulay and Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung’s review on Wandile Kasibe's concept of “museums as crime scenes”.

Installation view of The Vitrine © LIUSA WANG Gallery

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The Lighting

Video 1920 x 1090, 3 Channels, 5.1 Sound, 21 min, 2021

Work commissioned by Han Nefkens Foundation

Light is the spectre that hovers around photographic technologies. From analogue to digital and from light-sensitive coating to computer algorithms, light always occupies an irreplaceable place in competing image-making technologies. Throughout the process of negotiating with light, however, it is now obvious that human prejudices have unknowingly and almost imperceptibly infiltrated this competition. Filmmaker Godard is one of the first people who became aware of this crisis: when he was in Mozambique assisting the African country’s development of image in the 70s, he realized that Kodak films that were mainstream of the time could not be accurately exposed to portraits featuring subjects of dark skin tones. We cannot simply attribute this technical failure to inadequate equipment for the reason that even the most advanced algorithms used today still show a rather high error rate when determining certain races and skin tones.

The experimental video The Lighting aims to revisit and clarify the problem of discrimination rooted in technological development through an interdisciplinary exploration. The work comprises three narratives — a professional Togolese photographer explores how to use instruments to compensate for insufficient exposure to dark skin tones; software engineers developing facial recognition algorithms at Taiwan’s MediaTek talk about how they have created a camera algorithm that is highly popular in Africa; moreover, the artist uses Kodak’s Ektachrome, a popular film in the 70s, to produce a kung fu film in the style of exploitation film, using images of a famous Black martial art film star, Jim Kelly, in Bruce Lee’s movies in the 70s. The work is also interlaced with an animated Bruce Lee as the narrator trained by facial motion capture and a speech recognition algorithm.

☞ Video Trailer

Still image from the video The Lighting © Musquiqui Chihying

Installation view of The Lighting at 72nd Berlinale Forum Expanded © Leonie Hugendubel

Installation view of The Lighting at Art Sonje Center, Seoul, South Korea © Yang Ian

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The Kung Flu

Lecture Performance Video

Video 1920 x 1080, 2 Channels, Stereo Sound, 21min, 2021

Work commissioned by Han Nefkens Foundation

The title of the work is inspired by a phrase created by the then US president, Donald Trump, during his 2020 presidential campaign. A cunning blend of racial stereotyping and discrimination, the phrase became a sensation and was rapidly circulated via streaming media, deepening the Western world’s prejudices against the Asian communities in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, in particular, the speculation of Asians as virus carriers. At this point, the notion of the “sick man of East Asia” has truly evolved from a politically critical phrase at its birth into a racial imagination implying innate biological flaws. The Kung Flu adopts the form of a lecture-performance video in the attempt to deconstruct the association between the virus, kung fu stereotypes and image while further discussing the problem of racial discrimination in Asia, especially in Taiwan.

Still image from the video The Kung Flu © Musquiqui Chihying

Installation view at The Museum of Contemporary Art, Taipei, Taiwan © Musquiqui Chihying

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The Currency

In cooperation with Elom 20ce and Gregor Kasper

Sound Installation, 12” Vinyl, 5 min 32 sec / 10 min 57 sec, 2020

Online Listening: http://the-currency.net/record

Work commissioned by Times Art Center

The Currency is a vinyl EP whose golden colour is reminiscent of a wafer, one of the thin silicon discs used in the production of microchips. The rap song of the same name on the A-side is a collaboration between artists Elom 20ce, Musquiqui Chihying and Gregor Kasper. The lyrics, in French, Mandarin, and German, offer a poetic take on various aspects of contemporary cultures and economies that are often overlooked or go unnoticed: the entanglement of digital payment services in China (WeChat and AliPay) with the everyday lives of their users, whose every movement and action can be monitored by the state and the market; the new currency ECO, which is set to replace the current CFA franc in eight West African countries at the end of 2020, representing the first step toward monetary independence for these nations; the material foundations, such as the working conditions of the industry producing wafers and other electronic hardware, disregarded by the widespread belief in a clean, free, and fair digital cloud.

The B-side contains the sound piece The Hubs, a conversation with the ar- chitect, anthropologist, and FabLab founder Sénamé Koffi Agbodjinou. In the WoeLab “open hardware” workshop in Lomé, Agbodjinou introduced an alternative digital barter currency that relies on social activities and local service as a medium of exchange.

Installation view at Times Art Center, Berlin, Germany

Vinyl Available at Sternberg Press

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The Gesture II

In cooperation with Chen Liang-Hsuan

Installation, Performance Dimensions variable, 2020

Work commissioned by Taipei Fine Arts Museum

The Gesture II considers the nature of pop culture, taking as its starting point the zombie movies of Hong Kong and Taiwan that reached a zenith of popularity in the 1990s. Cooperating with a professional Taoist priest, it examines specific symbols in Hong Kong and Taiwan zombie movies, such as gestures and talismans, and explores how they metaphorized and reflected the anxieties of the masses, transformed fear into comedy, and became popular images, before being internalised and absorbed back into the public consciousness. At a time when Covid-19 runs rampant, besides wearing face masks, what we do with our hands is a crucial part of disease prevention. To better protect ourselves from infection, we must frequently wash our hands and disinfect them with rubbing alcohol. These new daily hand gestures are not only official directives but have also become a movement of the people. Hand gestures have demarcated a new boundary line, illustrating the divide between “inner/safe” and “external/ dangerous.” But hand gestures serving as barriers are not something that protects us in this era alone – they have long constituted a form of human culture.

Installation view at Taipei Fine Arts Museum, Taipei, Taiwan

Still image from the video installation The Gesture II

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The Gesture I

In cooperation with Chen Liang-Hsuan

Lecture Performance, 30 min, 2019

LED Screen, Digital Projection, 3D Printing Sculptures x 9

Work commissioned by Times Museum

Filmed in 1985 in Hong Kong and Taiwan, Mr. Vampire is a classic Chinese-language zombie film. Mr. Vampire subtly combines the genres of Kungfu, Thriller, and Comedy, spawning an almost overnight box office sensation in the Hong Kong and Taiwan film industries. Wearing court robes from the Qing Dynasty with their ghostly visages, the zombies in the film have also been understood as metaphors for “the other” and “fear.” In the 1980s, when Hong Kong and Taiwan’s economies were taking off, the film projected the public’s fear and anxiety about the other and uncertainty about the future. Even now, with the changing times, the root causes of anxiety about the transformation of political identities, immigration, and epidemic invasion have not been eliminated.

The lecture performance The Gesture I appropriates nine gestures in Taoist exorcism rituals used by the master (played by Lam Ching Ying) in the film, to fight demonic powers: Power, Energy, Harmony, Healing, Intuition, Awareness, Dimension, Creation, and Absolute, exploring the cultural representation in Chinese zombie films and how they can be used as a possible way to respond to contemporary anxieties.

Lecture performance at Times Museum, Guang, China

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The Sculpture

Video installation

1920 x 1080, 2 channels, 28 min, 5.1 Sound, 2018 - 2020

Photograph B&W, C-Print, 150 x 150 cm

Work commissioned by Ullens Center for Contemporary Art

The Sculpture, an experimental documentary consisting of performance and photographs, focusses on the recently established collection of African art in the National Museum of China in Beijing. Through carefully inspecting these foreign objets d’art, the film attempts to explore the essential meaning of museums, and also the geopolitical relations as constructed by the Asian, African and European continents. Through the transformation and appropriation of Maurice Jarnoux’s iconic photograph of André Malraux in 1954 standing next to his prototypical art book “Imaginary Museum”, this new filmic stage reveals aspects of the collection which are otherwise hidden by the dark obscurity of museums.

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The Culture Center

Installation

Zinc Alloy, Magnifying Glass, 5 Set Coins, 2018 - 2020

Work commissioned by Ullens Center for Contemporary Art

and Center Pompidou

The Cultural Center is an installation that begins with group of Ming-era coins uncovered in Kenya by the Chicago Field Museum’s team of archeologists. The coins’ journey, from dynastic China to the Kilwa Sultanate, reveals a network of cultural and economic circulation that predates European contact, and pushes against tired histories that fixate on the subsequent Ming isolationism that “deprived” China of naval dominance. Circumnavigating this discursive terrain, filled with images of Chinese deficiency, Chihying instead foregrounds this earlier moment of African exchange with a non-European power, and connects it to the present moment by creating another set of coins. These, however, are stamped with important African cultural institutions—a theater, two “cultural palaces,” a history museum, and an art museum—owned or built by multinational Chinese firms in the 21st century.

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WORK INFO