Too Loud a Dust, Musquiqui Chihying (2023) (EMPIRE LINES x Tabula Rasa Gallery, London Gallery Weekend 2023)

Artist Musquiqui Chihying brushes up the history of displaying sick and strong Asian bodies, from the Formosa Hamlet or human zoo at the Japan-British Exhibition in 1910, to COVID-19, both connected to their own contemporary exhibition in London’s Tabula Rasa Gallery.

Musquiqui Chihying’s multimedia installation, ‘Too Loud a Dust’, delves into two events from 1910: the construction of t he Formosa Hamlet by the Japanese Empire at the Japanese-British Exhibition in London, and the publication of ‘Diseases of China’ by the British missionary James Laidlaw Maxwell. With soil ‘stolen’ from the Japanese Garden, which remains in White City today, and dust from the Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford, he considers how indigenous Korean and Ainu Japanese bodies were represented then and now, and how transparent glass has been used to separate - and - other viewers and subjects.

The artist connects the contemporary and the historic, sharing how archive colonial postcards recalled the Dragonball cards he collected in his home in Taiwan, pan-Asian influences including the Japanese proto-feminist poet, Masano Akiko, and why his research during the COVID pandemic, revealed continued racism and prejudices against Asian people, and contemporary ‘neocolonialism’ between China and Africa. Whilst cleaning a museum may be a necessary task, Chihying describes how dust in display cabinets also carries valuable information, challenging concepts of ‘purity’, and how anthropology and natural history museums ‘function’.

Musquiqui Chihying: Too Loud A Dust runs at the Tabula Rasa Gallery in London until 29 June 2023. This episode was recorded at London Gallery Weekend 2023.

WITH: Musquiqui Chihying, contemporary visual artist based in Taipei and Berlin. Specialising in the use of multimedia such as film and sound, he investigates the human and environmental system in the age of global capitalisation, and contemporary social culture in the Global South.

ART: ‘Too Loud a Dust, Musquiqui Chihying (2023)'.

IMAGE: Installation View.

PRODUCER: Jelena Sofronijevic.

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