Yi Ting Hsu

Yi Ting Hsu (b. 1992 in Taiwan) received her MFA from Taipei National University of Arts in 2020. She had also participated in a study exchange program at Academy of Fine Art in Prague in 2019. Her works are based on site-specific practices, and she mainly works through live performance, with focus on power relations in the artistic field, urban morphology, and social systems. As an agent but also as an organic builder, she explores the boundaries of the power structures, and the resistance, manipulation, and speculation that occur between the center and the margin of the institutional cores. Her methods of presentation include installation, video, document, painting and performance.


During my stay, I would like to develop a site-specific performance project “Find Shelter” about walls, boundaries, safety, and danger. I would also like to get started with writing poetry, drawing, and researching to collect events and observations. Meanwhile I will keep working on the “Body Scape” painting series I began in 2022 on a residency journey in Hamburg and Barcelona.

The environment and history in Suomenlinna remind me of Kinmen Island in Taiwan, next to China with only 5 km in between. Based on the common points of structure and fortification they inspire me to start “Find Shelter” in HIAP, a work about how we imagine a safe distance in a relationship.

Earlier, I had developed a performance series “Floating Body”, and also a project “Between Border” in Czech in 2019. Whether the boundaries are visible or invisible, I try to shake the ubiquitous power structure and explore the human nature by means of spatial simile, place overlap, and location metaphor.

Yi Ting Hsu’s residency is supported by the National Culture and Arts Foundation (NCAF) in Taiwan.