Single Copy

A film producer, an assassin, and a patriot. These aren’t three characters in this film but three ways of describing Wu Dun, a member of the United Bamboo Gang who murdered the Taiwanese-American writer Henry Liu and became a producer of wuxia films. Hsu Che-yu, who previously brought Single Copy (IFFR 2020) and Re-rupture (IFFR 2018) to Rotterdam, visits Wu’s abandoned studio to restage the events with forensic scanning techniques.

While suspended from a crane eight storeys up in the air, a man performs a guitar solo. The act staged in homage to a failed art project from 20 years ago is one of several moments in Taiwanese history that artist Hsu Che-yu unearths and reanimates.

Accelerator digitally reconstructs the first linear particle accelerator built in colonial Taiwan by physicist Bunsaku Arakatsu and later dismantled by the United States after World War II. Through unstable 3D models, the work traces Taiwan’s scientific infrastructure, secret weapons research, and Cold War nuclear development, linking computational imaging to the lingering specter of the island’s unfinished nuclear history.

We encountered the dogs 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.

Artist Hsu Che-yu blends his digitally animated exploration of the relation between media and memory with an account of Taiwanese terrorist Yung Ru-Men, a bomb maker who idolised Japan’s suicidally-inclined United Red Army.

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.

With a rabbit's dead body in hand, a glove puppetry performer reenacts the movements of rabbits as imagined by humans. The project was initiated by the death of a laboratory rabbit, and was inspired by the artist's family memories. The artist's grandma served in an animal laboratory for thirty years, during which, due to the particularity of her job, she had to dissect living animals for observation and experiments.