Su Hui-Yu (b. 1976, Taiwan)
The Glamorous Boys of Tang, 2018

Nexus, Adelaide (SA), Australia / Visited on 14/11/2019

Some works feel relevant on some subconscious level. Or maybe that relevance seem to reside in a Pandoras box of sorts that should not be opened by too precise an articulation.

An unsettling fantasy mixing glamour and gore is playing out on the screen. But whose fantasy is it and what does it do in an art gallery? The artist is following some fragmentary childhood memories that lead him to a cult film that leads him to its original script, some scenes of which have never been shot – so he stages them himself. Is it his fantasy? Or the author’s of the original script? Or an echo of the olden times it is referring to? Would it have been admitted to art galleries if it was just this particular person’s sexual fantasy? Or does it require this chain of conceptual provenance in order not to be classified as an extravagant gore-porn?

I’m not doing gore. I’m not doing porn. But I am playing around with some projects that may be balancing in some foggy territory between fetishistic fantasy, artworld references and everyday. Not sure yet where it is going or what it is about… possibly, yet another case of testing the borders between the private and the public, normal and deviate, acceptable and inappropriate or, rather, various considerations that are inherent part of such border-drawing…