Hsu Chia-Wei 橡膠球 Rubber Balls, 2025

Rubber Balls (2025) is a four-channel video installation composed of four monitors set within a large-scale freestanding iron frame open like a book, across which strips of natural Indonesian rubber sheets are stretched and interlaced. Hsu Chia-Wei revisits the history of rubber exploitation in Indonesia under Dutch colonial rule, drawing on archival documentary footage filmed in the Dutch East Indies between 1913 and 1945, provided by the Eye Filmmuseum, Amsterdam.*

Hsu’s installation brings together historical research and AI-generated imagery — developed in collaboration with the Industrial Technology Research Institute (ITRI) in Taiwan — to examine the relationship between colonial archives, extractive economies, and contemporary technologies of image-making. Hsu draws in part on Hella S. Haasse’s 1948 novel Oeroeg [The Black Lake], which follows the childhood friendship between a Dutch boy and an Indonesian boy on a rubber plantation as it becomes fractured by the racial and political tensions of the colonial period. Interweaving archival footage, audio recordings of a traditional Indonesian musician playing on a rubber farm, and AI-generated images of Haasse’s fictional characters, Rubber Balls challenges the colonial archive while examining how colonial systems transformed traditional farming practices into large-scale resource extraction. The installation also marks the beginning of a new body of work through which Hsu will further examine colonial histories in Asia.

Hsu Chia-Wei’s multidisciplinary practice spans film, installation, research, and curatorial work, combining cinematic language with historical investigation to examine the production of images and the construction of historical narratives. Drawing on archival material, oral histories, mythology, geopolitics, and speculative fiction, his works trace overlooked connections between people, materials, and places situated at the margins of official histories. Focusing particularly on Asia and the lingering effects of the Cold War, colonialism, industrialization, and transnational migration, Hsu constructs layered narratives in which documentary and fiction continuously intersect. Through immersive films and installations, the artist reveals the mechanisms through which political power, memory, and ideology shape collective perception, often foregrounding hidden infrastructures, displaced communities, and forgotten historical episodes.

*This project is supported by the Eye Filmmuseum, Amsterdam.