Che-Yu Hsu


Che-Yu Hsu presents the video piece 副本人 (Single Copy, 2019), a poetic contemplation on techniques of remembrance and the capturing, copying, and reproducing of the human experience. The biographical video is narrated by Chang Chung-I, who lost his brother Chang Chung-Jen due to a brain hemorrhage the year of the video production. Exactly forty years earlier, in 1979, the brothers who shared one body during the first three years of their life, became renowned as the first Taiwanese conjoined twins to be surgically separated—their twelve-hour long separation operation at the National Taiwan University Hospital in Taipei was broadcast live and internationally on television. Before the operation, the hospital had hired an artist to cast a model of the twins’ body yet failed as the toddlers couldn’t stand still. Forty years later, without his brother or their shared leg, which was abandoned during the surgery, Chang Chung-I’s body is cast twice again: through a fiberglass mold as well as a 3D-scan that merges more than hundred camera angles, the latter together with his wife and his own twin children.