Connecting people through art 

We are pleased to extend an invitation to the opening of Hsu Che-Yu’s solo exhibition, City Strays and Wild Horses, on December 15th 2023, at 2pm, followed by the artist’s talk, with curator Nobuo Takamori, moderated by Sean C. S. Hu. 

The conversation will be opened with an introduction by Hilde Teerlinck, CEO and Director of the Han Nefkens Foundation.

The exhibition, City Strays and Wild Horses, is the result of Hsu winning the Han Nefkens Foundation – Loop Barcelona Video Art Production Grant 2020, in collaboration with the Fundació Joan Miró; Centre d'Art Contemporain, Genève; Inside-Out Art Museum, Beijing; MoCA Taipei and ILHAM, Kuala Lumpur.

The horses hail from Mongolia. We captured images along a boundary within Mongolia, chronicling the contrasting landscapes on each side. This boundary delineates the realms of the Przewalski's horse and the domestic horse: on one side, a 506 square-kilometer sanctuary safeguards wild horses, free from human intervention – untouched and unaided; on the opposite side, horses lead entirely different lives under human care, serving as children's companions, workers, modes of transport, sustenance, and sources of amusement.

The dogs are domestic to Kosovo, encountered on the forays through Pristina’s streets. At night, we melded into the canine throngs, shadowing their movements until they dispersed and vanished. The residents imparted a saga of these dogs: in the late 1990s, as Serbian troops and Albanian insurgents clashed, domestic dogs were cast adrift on the battleground streets. Ever since, Pristina has been a tableau of roaming dog packs, with sporadic human-dog confrontations.

These creatures' modes of existence might illustrate diverse paradigms of ecological management. Mongolia's Przewalski's horses appear more liberated than their domesticated counterparts, yet they inhabit a Truman Show-esque reality, cataloged from the outset and under constant scrutiny by zoologists (and tourists). Every moment of their births, lives and deaths is archived, rendering them isolated specimens of "nature." In contrast, Pristina's street dogs navigate a world neither curated like domestic horses nor segregated like wild horses. They've weathered the storms of war alongside the city's denizens, transiently partaking in moments of tranquility and tumult.

Link

https://www.mocataipei.org.tw/en/ExhibitionAndEvent/Info/City*Strays*and*Wild*Horses%E2%80%94HSU*Che-Yu*Solo*Exhibition