Hsu\u2019s first exhibition in Canada, curated by Kate Wong, surveys work from the 1980s to the present, including painting, sculpture, drawing, and a site-specific wrap of the museum\u2019s industrial architecture. Installed without chronology to productive effect, there is resounding aesthetic consistency across the decades: in nearly all his work, tongues, limbs, hands, eyeballs, spinal cords, anuses, gaping mouths, or ambiguously fleshy appendages appear contained within or bursting through taut, stretched surfaces. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
This charged eroticism is most apparent in the exhibition\u2019s namesake work from 2002: two canvas panels fill the end wall with a morphing grid of licking tongues, biting lips, and outstretched arms and hands pressing against a shifting matrix of bodily orifices. The effect is one of a totalizing biomorphic world, in which the interface between corporeal and virtual is almost nonexistent. Earlier works\u2014The Cross Product of Madame X<\/em> (1984), Portrait 2<\/em> (1984), and R.E.M.<\/em> (1987)\u2014are stunning sculptural abstractions in paint, concrete, wood, and Styrofoam. Minimal, pastel-hued, fleshy palettes are layered and scratched into rounded substrates, and fluid, ambiguous forms churn under vibrating surfaces; standing close by is like catching static from a TV screen. Indeed, Hsu\u2019s soft-edge geometries often mimic the seductive object-qualities of devices, and a strange coincidence occurs in Bloody Mary<\/em> (1983): the central shape anticipates the near-exact dimensions of an iPhone. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Hsu has been an artist and teacher for more than five decades, and when he started showing widely again in recent years, many reviewers drew upon a consistent range of references: abjection and body horror (iconic film director David Cronenberg is often mentioned), technological anxieties, surrealist influences, the erotic and sublime, and, frequently, that his work was and is ahead of its time. Hsu was not unknown early in his career, however, and had several well-received commercial shows in New York in the late 1980s. Critics then made similar assessments about his prescient ability to narrate tensions between bodies and machines. But Hsu isn\u2019t predicting how technology might evolve, rather he is articulating that human anxieties around technology persist, no matter the era. The \u201980s maxim that television will rot your brain has its Gen Alpha counter in online brainrot.<\/p>\n\n\n\n In 1987, artist and critic Claudia Hart wrote about Hsu in an essay for Artscribe International<\/em>: \u201cHuman beings \u2026 internalize the procedures and strategies of technological systems, their behaviours and manners mimic a technology that has gained a certain autonomy. \u2026 \u2018We make machines, then they make us,\u2019 Hsu has stated.\u201d Embodying the permeability of machinic consciousness, whether metaphoric or actual, remains at the crux of Hsu\u2019s practice. In the newest works here\u2014two small drawings on acetate, encased in steel with bulbous protrusions on the frames\u2014eerie faces appear as though glitching or stuck, their blank eyes making an unusually direct appeal. They encapsulate the ambiguities produced by mixing corporeal and virtual spaces, creating a kind of haptic afterimage\u2014a charged feeling that lingers in the body even after its stimulus dissolves.<\/p>\n\n\n\n An editor and writer, Jayne Wilkinson holds an MA in art history and critical theory from the University of British Columbia, and her writing has appeared in Artforum<\/em>, C Magazine<\/em>, e-flux<\/em>, Esse arts + opinions<\/em>, Momus<\/em>, and other magazines and journals.<\/p>\n\n\n![\"Tishan-Hsu\"](\"https:\/\/esse.ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/01\/113_CR_Spencer_Tishan-Hsu_exhibitionview_4260.jpg\")
Interface Remix,<\/em> exhibition view, MOCA Toronto, 2024.
\u00a9 Tishan Hsu \/ Artists Rights Society, New York (2024)
Photo: LF Documentation<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n