Hung-Fu Tsai

Hung-Fu Tsai 蔡宏輔

Taiwanese

Thesis: Objects Distanced from Myth

Why do we collect? As people move across places and generations, how do objects become anchors for memory and history?

Abstract

This thesis examines how artifacts shift between different states of life as they move from their original ritual or functional contexts into the museum, where they often become distanced, muted, or ghostlike.

Through case studies at the Guimet Museum, the Rijksmuseum, Madame Tussauds, and the British Museum, I explore how display mechanisms, vitrines, souvenirs, and technological reproductions reshape object agency and generate new afterlives in the form of simulacra.

Drawing on theories of agency, aura, and mediation, the thesis shows how reproductions can sometimes gain more vitality and relational power than the originals they reference.

Returning home as a craftsperson, I consider whether handmade objects offer yet another form of rebirth—one rooted not in replicating the past but in restoring material presence, bodily memory, and connection.

By placing museum encounters alongside craft practice, the thesis reconsiders what it means for an artifact to be alive, and how objects regain presence through the relationships they form in the present.

Lines of Position

This work begins with a display cabinet that has long stood in my grandparents’ living room. Inside are bottles of liquor, ceramic and porcelain objects, and photographs. Many of them are gifts from others or souvenirs that my grandfather brought back from Europe while working as a cook on a ferry in his youth. As a mainland Chinese who relocated to Taiwan during wartime, my grandfather’s life was shaped by displacement, travel, and movement. Years later, when I too moved abroad for my studies, I began to question the relationship between drifting and collecting: is it a search for stability, or a response to displacement?

Combining the forms of a bó gǔ shelf (博古架), a traditional Chinese display structure and a topographic map. The work brings together three narratives of migration at different scales: my grandfather’s experience as a cook on a ferry, the relocation of the National Palace Museum’s collections to Taiwan, and my own experience of mobility as an international student living overseas. Through these intertwined trajectories of people and objects, the work explores the connections between collecting, migration, and memory.

A display structure originally belonging to the domestic environment is transformed into a public exhibition setting. Through embodied practices such as etching and sewing, the work reconfigures the relationships between family memory, historical narratives, and material objects.

_{Photo credits: Kasper Boelens and Yan-Zhi Kang}