Irene Hsiao is a dancer, writer, and multidisciplinary artist. Her experimental movement practice is inspired by visual art and museums. She strives to create uncanny situations that cause people to perceive more deeply, to question what they perceive, and to respond with their own creativity. By cultivating the impulse to question and respond to what is in plain sight, she invites viewers to participate in a process that is free, inclusive, and open to adaptation and evolution.

The Project

Irene Hsiao’s research for the HCL residency was interrupted and ignited by the premature closure of the exhibition The Allure of Matter: Material Art from China curated by Wu Hung and Orianna Cacchione for The Smart Museum and Wrightwood 659. Because the foundational plan for an evening-length, audience-participatory dance in the galleries was unable to proceed, she began to work in virtual spaces and on film, creating Black Flame, a live Zoom performance with a cappella singing and at-home audience-participatory artmaking, Merely a Mistake: A Score for your Door, a monumental community video project, and Transformation, a solo dance performance in the museum galleries and two curated drawing projects on the subject of memory, to further her aim of creating inclusive, embodied experiences of artworks and viewers of art.

In 2021 and beyond, she continues a practice developed through repeated investigations in public spaces into the material, mortality, markmaking, and what it means to witness and undergo erasure. This includes the transformation of Transformation into an iterative and inclusive process of repetition and development that will challenge the permanence of film through a series of live performances and interventions through dance, writing, film, photography, and other media.  

She has described how artwork guides her practice: “how does the material wish to move? How does its form inform our motions? How do its environment and entities within it affect our experience? What can its concept and process teach us? By allowing the public experiments to unfold over hours, weeks, and even months, I learn about the artwork and the work of art—that is, the relationship art builds with us.”

Because it is impossible to know the uncanny valley humanity will enter after Covid, Irene Hsiao is attending to ways her practice will reposition itself to the new environment of our heightened individuation. Sheltering at home has become the hothouse for her new study of humans, the content they are experiencing, and the communities they are creating through the distance and intimacy of their digital devices. 

She asks, “Can erasure become a new site for experimentation?” and answers by keeping her art practice attuned to human experience in a surreal time.

Projects Supported by HCL

In Place, 2022

In Place contains: In Place: Medium, Image, Landscape, virtual community art project, Smart Museum of Art, 2021-;

In Place: Drawing You Outside, site-specific, interactive performance, Jackson Park’s Wooded Island, 2022;

In Place: Reflection/Projection, interactive installation at High Concept Labs, 2022;

In Place: In Time—remnants, five films and a soundscape, premiered October 16, 2022 at High Concept Labs

Mond(e)月亮代表我的心, 2022 — 20-minute work-in-progress showing at Pivot Arts Festival 2022

Translated Vase, 2022 — Two videos inspired by Yeesookyung's Translated Vase

Passage, 2021 — An experiment in space, time, and being together

Body Letters | Cartas Corporais, 2020 — “We didn’t speak the same language, so

we exchanged body letters”

About the Artist

Irene Hsiao is a 2020 Chicago Dancemakers Forum Lab Artist, the inaugural Artist in Residence at the Smart Museum of Art in 2020 and 2021, and the first Artist in Residence at 21c Museum Hotel Chicago in 2022. Her recent work comprises a series inspired by the exhibition The Allure of Matter: Material Art from China, curated by Wu Hung and Orianna Cacchione at the Smart Museum of Art and Wrightwood 659. The Allure series includes Score for an Unfinished Dance (2020); Black Flame (2020), a live virtual performance with a cappella music combined with optional at-home art-making, inspired by Liu Jianhua’s eponymous installation of eight thousand black porcelain flames; Merely a Mistake: A Score for your Door (2020), a large community video project inspired by Liu Wei’s “Merely a Mistake II No. 7,” a stabile created from doors and doorframes from homes demolished during the urbanization of Beijing; and Transformation (2020), a film created in collaboration with Vin Reed with Yin Xiuzhen’s eponymous installation of photographs mounted on roof tiles scavenged during Beijing’s urban transformation, presented alongside two curated drawing projects by Jad Dahshan and August Kellman. 

Additional work includes 49 encounters with chiçiçiçichiciçi (2019), with Cevdet Erek’s fence and sound installation “chiçiçiçichiciçi”; Inside My Room Is Another Fishbowl (2018), with the fish in Philippe Parreno’s “My Room Is Another Fish Bowl”, both at The Art Institute of Chicago; DIALOGO DIALOGO(2018), in/on/at/with Virginio Ferrari’s outdoor sculpture “Dialogo”, accompanied by composer and carillonneur Joey Brink; Monster Studies (2016) a suite of pieces to artworks by Seymour Rosofsky, Cosmo Campoli, Nancy Spero, and Leon Golub at The Smart Museum as part of the exhibition Monster Roster: Existentialist Art in Postwar Chicago; and The Radiant and the Dead, a site-specific collaboration with Connor Plunkett and India Weston on Emmanuel Pratt’s “Radical (Re)Constructions” installation. 

Irene Hsiao has performed with Kinetech Arts, Alma Esperanza Cunningham Movement, Lenora Lee Dance, Labayen Dance/SF, Winifred Haun & Dancers, South Chicago Dance Theatre, Yin He Dance, Nejla Yatkin, Carole McCurdy, Erica Mott Productions, Meadows Dance Collective, and other companies and projects in North America, Asia, and Europe.

Her essays, poems, articles, and reviews have appeared in the Chicago Reader, LA Review of Books, SF Weekly, Newcity, Chicago Sun-Times,Cambridge Quarterly, Victorian Poetry, Multi-Ethnic Literature of the US, Literary Imagination, Modern Philology, Word Riot, elimae, A Clean Well-Lighted Place, and Sweet, as well as in the book Peter Pan In and Out of Time. Her book of photography and text, Letter from Taipei, was published in 2014. She has been awarded the Louis Martz Prize by the William Carlos Williams Society and nominated for a Pushcart Prize.

For more information, visit Irene’s website.

Events with HCL

Dance Sound Sound Dance Party | Friday, June 21, 2024