Artist Tishan Hsu Was Ahead of His Time. Now His Art Is More Relevant Than Ever.

By Julie Belcove

Back in the early 1980s, before personal computers and the internet and Wi-Fi and iPhones, before Facebook and Google and Uber and Netflix, when tax returns and college theses and invitations and bills were all on paper, Tishan Hsu worked nights word processing in law firms so he could make art by day. A graduate of MIT and a keen observer of the human condition, he noticed not only the speed with which a word processor churned out documents but how operating the nascent technology made a person sit, how it made a person feel. Gradually, a funny thing happened: The two worlds collided.

Liquid Circuit, 1987. Courtesy of Peter Ross.

His paintings and sculptures began to reflect his assessment that technology was becoming an extension of the human body, a condition he concluded was destined to intensify over time. Modular tiles in his sculptures echoed bits of digital data; three-dimensional objects hinted at contraptions yet to come. Paintings evoked computer monitors but also blood cells or flesh. The body, he determined, could no longer be depicted the way it had been for millennia. Hsu was seeing the future. “At that point, art was in this camp and the technology people were in the other camp, and they were going to be ‘evil,’ undermining the humanistic world we live in,” he says. “And I didn’t see it that way.” Making no value judgment on new technology itself, Hsu was interested instead in its inevitability—and its impact...READ MORE