Manray Hsu: Introducing Contemporary Art to Grandma

4 episodes in total. (Duration: 15 minutes per episode)

Taiwan is a multilingual country of immigrants. In the process of colonial meodernity, colonizers enforced official languages, using education, and propaganda as other mechanisms of oppression, to result in the loss of mother tongues. Even though some mother tongues managed to (barely) survive in in everyday life, and spoken and written language in most specialized field, including art, has come to be dominated by “colonial mother tongues”. Introducing Contemporary Art to Grandma is a Minnanese program, in which the speaker introduces contemporary art to a fictional grandmother, using hies own broken ““grandmother tongue” to explain key concept from such a specialized field that is fettered in the official, colonized language. This concepts include modern art, contemporary art, new media art, and “indigenous” contemporary art.

Manray Hsu

Manray Hsu is an independent curator and critic. His intellectual work focuses on cultural conditions of globalization, the relationship between aesthetics and politics, and geopolitical situations of contemporary art. Manray Hsu has curated exhibitions include Wayward Economy  (2005, Taipei); Liverpool Biennial (2006, co-consulted/curated with Gerardo Mosquera); Naked Life (2006, Taipei Museum of Contemporary Art); Taipei Biennial  (2000, co-curated with Jerome Sans; 2008 co-curated with Vasif Kortun, Taipei Fine Arts Museum); Forum Biennial of Taiwanese Contemporary Art (2010, TCAC); Autostrada Biennale (2017, Kosovo); The South –An Art of Asking and Listening (2017, Kaohsiung Museum Of Fine Arts). Manray Hsu often engages in collective work on workshop, conference and publication in Europe, America, Asia and Australia.