There’s a cloud in the shape of you leavingYuping Hsu

媒材

Electronic parts, Motor, Arduino, Aluminum alloy, iPad, Video, Digital photo, Frames

年份

2016

Artwork

We used to write each other all the time, a form of alchemy which transforms and crystalizes, inscribed onto paper. Distance and technology, syncopated contractions and expansions. Distance itself remains unchanged, while the distribution of sentiments are completely different. What used to be a complete block is now fragments and snippets, fighting its way into instantaneous moments, or lost in reconnection. (Where do they go?)

In the kinetic piece “Poor Connection” my boyfriend and I read each other fragments from Simone de Beauvoir’s “A Transatlantic Love Affair: Letters to Nelson Algren”, selecting parts that resonates with our condition. The two iPads are in a state of “reconnecting” when they approach and depart from the meeting point, only when the two finally connects do they start reading to one another. “My heart was beating fast, I could feel with my fingers this bit of paper which you have touched with your fingers.” As of now the sense of touch and warmth radiates from a block of overheated metal, where is the romance? The act of waiting undergoes a change of state, from the joy and anticipation of receiving a letter to the angst of staring into the void of reconnectingness.

“Airplane and love, the sky and the sadness and the hope were one only thing.” This line echoes with the piece “There is a cloud in the shape of you leaving,” something I said with a light frown one afternoon sending him off to the airport, when we strolled down the city with an airplane contrail drawn across the sky. This piece is a collection of airplane contrails from the internet, forming a line and disappearing into the pillow. Strands of hair that had forgotten to leave.

Artist

Rae Yuping Hsu (b.1989) was born in Taipei, Taiwan. Her background is in the field of medicine, rehabilitation. Her works are primarily kinetic sculptures and installations that center on the dull, throbbing ache of longing suggesting that absence can sometimes be more powerful than presence. On love and loss. Negatives. “The Phantom Limb in Pain” is the title of her ongoing thesis and an umbrella diagnosis for her practice which focuses on absence and forgetting and things that are felt as a lack.

National Taiwan University medical college, Rhode Island School of Design MFA.

Received awards from National Taiwan Museum of Fine Art, sculpture, new media art, Ministry of Education study abroad grant, Ministry of culture exhibition grant, Taipei Art Awards…etc.