Hsu Chia-Wei, 橡膠球 Rubber Balls, 2025

2025

Medium

Four-channel video installation, TV screens, powder-coated aluminum and stainless steel frame, natural rubber sheets

Dimensions

300 × 340 cm

Edition

Edition of 3 plus 1 artist's proof

Status

In Gallery Collection

Collect24 Art ID

C24-157739

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.