Su Hui-Yu

September 19 – November 14 2021

Two comprehensive video installations by Taiwanese artist Su Hui-Yu (b. 1976, lives and works in Taipei) provide a fascinating parcours through a grand spectrum of interpersonal human relations at Kunsthalle Winterthur. In the main hall, the 3-channel-video installation The White Waters (2019) refers to the so-called Critical Point Theatre, a theatre group in the late 1980s that marked a new era of experimental theatre in Taiwan, and a milestone for gay culture within the country. In 1993, White Water, a play by Critical Point Theatre, premiered in Taipei. A contemporary interpretation of the Legend of the White Snake, a traditional Chinese myth about the problematic love between a (male) human being a (female) demon, White Water refreshed the saga by inserting themes around homosexuality, gender and political identity. It is this play that now serves as a blueprint for Su Hui-Yu’s The White Waters, in which the performers Jong Yi-Ling and Popcorn, an activist from Taipei’s drag community, perform these various references into a breath-taking drama complete with antagonistic gestures of attraction and repulsion, dominance and submission, aggression and devotion culminating in an orgiastic climax.
In Su Hui-Yu’s explicitly sensational five-channel video installation The Women’s Revenge (2020), five women set out with various weapons in order to attack and murder a group of helpless and eventually naked men. The motive of the women’s rage remains unclear; instead the artist offers us a sequence of tableaux-vivants, showing the same protagonists in ever-changing settings and costumes. Su Hui Yu combines the two installations in a new edit specifically designed for the presentation at Kunsthalle, showing alternately one after the other.

The White Waters was produced in collaboration with C-LAB (Taiwan Contemporary Culture Lab) and PERFORMA 19, with generous support of the Taiwanese Ministry of Culture and the Taipei Culture- Center in New York.The Women's Revenge was supported by 1646 Experimental Art Space. The exhibition at Kunsthalle Winterthur is supported by Kulturabteilung Taipeh Vertretung Berlin, Showtronic Solutions, and Röhm Switzerland.