Examine the link between gestures and violence through 'Zoo Hypothesis'

The Taiwanese artist Che-Yu Hsu explores the connection between media and memory through animation, video art, and art installation work. Hsu’s latest offering Zoo Hypothesis is an animated video that reconstructs taxidermied Taiwanese zoo animals and links their gestures to historical violence against animals that unfolded on a large scale in Japanese-occupied Taiwan during the Second World War. His practice has an intentionally detached and clinical quality that can be quite unnerving to confront as observed in the aforementioned work. Hsu joins STIR for an interview to discuss the video artwork, which is presently on view at the Fundació Joan Miró in Barcelona, Spain, through January 14.

Zoo Hypothesis places audiences in the middle of a conversation between a scriptwriter and an actor preparing for a performance. This imagined performance, in turn, transports viewers to a taxidermy studio, wherein the duo draws links to two climacteric incidents at the Taipei Zoo through the frozen gestures of the specimens on display.

The first of the two events was a memorial ceremony held to pay homage to animals that died due to military actions. Hsu tells STIR, "For this ceremony, animal trainers at the zoo taught the animals to participate, in ways such as training elephants to kneel as a sign of mourning for the fallen animals of war. I think this is contradictory in itself; it is a reflection on the calamities brought by war, yet the ceremony also has underlying military propaganda purposes.”

The second event was far more macabre, and occurred towards the end of the war to avert the potential escape of dangerous animals in the zoo, were it to have been bombed by the American military. Anticipating this possibility, the zoo officials decided to pre-emptively execute several animals. Eventually, the zoo turned these deceased animals into taxidermy specimens. As the video artist points out, “this act also presents a contradiction, with the killing of life and humanitarianism becoming intertwined.”

Hsu makes it a point to mention that the Zoo Hypothesis is not a critique of the violence against animals that occurred at Taipei Zoo, nor is the new media art piece a statement regarding our tendency as human beings to control and shape the natural world around us to better suit our objectives. Rather, he is interested in the contradictions of these events. As the artist tells STIR, “Taxidermy, as a technique, turns spiritual memory into an observed object. And the animal memorial ceremony simultaneously features aspects of both ritual and circus performance; a hybrid of grief and celebration.”

The bodies of the characters, objects, and animals that make up the world of the Zoo Hypothesis speak to a sense of profound hollowness, not unlike a taxidermy exhibit. In mentioning this to Hsu, the Taiwanese artist reveals that he has indeed taken some inspiration from taxidermy specimens for the aesthetics of the video. He says “On one hand, they [taxidermy specimens] are not replicas because taxidermists use the actual body of the animal, so the specimen is the original. But on the other hand, the specimen is indeed a representation and not the original animal.” Hsu’s rationale is that only the skin of a taxidermy specimen comes from the animal's real body, while the insides are filled with manufactured materials. Furthermore, the pose of the specimen, designed by the taxidermist, is an approximation of the animal’s proper stance. To the artist, this makes the process of taxidermy similar to 3D scanning, which he used to create character and environmental models for the Zoo Hypothesis. 3D scanning is a digital data gathering technique that collects three-dimensional data of real objects, to yield digital models. Hsu finds that both taxidermy and 3D scanning yield outputs that exist somewhere between reality and fiction.

Hsu approached the 3D scanning work he undertook for Zoo Hypothesis as a form of “reverse animation”. The new media artist explains that traditional animation concerns itself with breathing life into inanimate objects, however, he wished to “express death itself” through the aesthetics of the project. Hence, he utilised 3D scanning based on the parallels he perceived between the process and taxidermy and removed all texture and colour from the video. Audiences will also notice that the characters and animals depicted in the Zoo Hypothesis lack movement, and are instead placed in a series of static poses. This only serves to magnify the feeling of visiting a listless world, wherein all markers of life have been replaced by a clinically cold rationality that seeks to understand rather than empathise.