Hung-Fu Tsai

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

 

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.