A detail of Double Interface – Green (2022) by Tishan Hsu.
The surface of Tishan Hsu’s Double Interface – Green is strange. Equally fleshy and blurred like a digital image, the painting is easily read as articulating the murky boundaries between the internet and offline experience. Mouths and hands pressed against screens evoke a kind of horror – perhaps of scrolling, caught in an endless loop between dopamine hits and doom scrolling, or of the eerie omni-surveillance of contemporary life.
We spend our days watching and being watched. Being visible is both a currency and a position of vulnerability. The history of painting is also an articulation of the politics of visibility. In a literal sense, patrons controlled how they were depicted and remembered. In this way, paintings are tools of propaganda, carefully constructed to shape public perception and reproduce hierarchy. Mirrors often construct elaborate scenes, with narratives and metaphors of self reflection, longing and control. Photography evolves into the computer age, each shifting the relationship between artists and audience, the status of the image and creative labour.
Hsu’s background flows naturally into his work today. After he graduated from architecture at MIT, he became interested in sculpture and took on various temp jobs to support himself. Menial tasks on early computers were his first encounter with screens. ‘His thoughts would veer to what screens might do for memory and sense perception,’ Adriane Quinlan wrote for the New York Times. His interest in screens came a little too early as his artistic career bloomed in the 80s. When the artworld took notice, it looked to a younger generation of ‘digital natives’. In a way, this makes him more interesting as an artist. It’s possible to read this backwards (a curator once commented his 1986 painting Closed Circuit II prefigures Instagram’s logo) although perhaps it’s more interesting to encounter a response to technological shifts that is, refreshingly, off trend.
I saw this painting in Hardcore, an exhibition at Sadie Coles that was loosely about sex, although we might say it’s about disparate ideas of identity, intimacy and longing through the metaphor of the body. The gallery cites ‘cancel culture’ as a contemporary context which has ‘produced a timidly lower volume for discussions around difficult and more nuanced examinations of sexuality.’ In the gallery, there are faceless bodies, eroticised dolls, giant whips, a lot of leather, hunks of meat, porn and poetry. Hsu’s mouths read differently in this room. The digital smear is more sensual. The flow of the surface’s texture is at once bodily and also like the scroll of a feed. The orifices are gross, threatening.