Teil von ProtoZone19: Ruptures \ Reliances, 23.05.2025-03.08.2025

Sunless Circuit (2024)

Sunless Circuit delves into the intricate and often overlooked aspects of semiconductor manufacturing and its broader social implications. By linking labor and material awareness, Su’s work advocates for a more holistic understanding of technological production that includes extractive practices and the socio-economic conditions of workers.

The installation presents an abstract assembly line where artificial polycrystalline silicon chunks are placed—high-purity materials that cannot be found in nature but are fundamentally engineered through resource-intensive human intervention. The assembly line is constructed from three aluminum plates, each hanging from the ceiling in a hexagonal formation. These silicon chunks placed on the assembly line serve as a material reminder of the physical labor and resources that underpin modern technology.

The work takes on additional significance in today’s geopolitical landscape, where silicon and other critical minerals such as gallium and germanium for semiconductor manufacturing have become strategic assets. As the critical mineral supply chain becomes increasingly politicized, these materials transform into leverage points directly impacting national security interests and defense capabilities. Sunless Circuit thus operates not only as a commentary on invisible labor, but also as a materialization of how seemingly abstract technological components exist at the global ramifications of a new Cold War.

Particular waters (2023)

Internationally sought-after semiconductors require tons of water for their production. But where does the water come from? The film follows a former Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company worker who works as a truck driver tasked with transporting water from a local river to the factory – until she has changed her mind.

Taipei Biennial 2023 writes about this work:

Su Yu Hsin’s film installation Particular Waters (2023) addresses the water network in Hsinchu, home of the world’s most sought-after chipmaker, Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC). TSMC’s ultra-high-precision process of “printing” microchips with light has enabled dizzying technological growth for humanity as a whole, while also famously serving as a strategic “silicon shield” securing Taiwan’s prosperity as well as guarding against existential threats.

Perhaps counterintuitively, Su Yu Hsin proposes a material awareness of what TSMC’s success in the planetary domains of global supply chains and geopolitics means for the people and ecology of Hsinchu itself. Chip manufacturing consumes an enormous volume of water. Where does that water come from? Who gains access to it, and on what terms? Given that the growth of TSMC has been much more predictable than the rainfall in Taiwan in the past decades, what are the ecological consequences of industrial exuberance and extraction? Particular Waters addresses these questions through storytelling, reconstructing Hsinchu’s 2021 drought from the perspective of a female water truck driver.

The installation includes “dummy wafers”—used to test machines used in semiconductor production—whose silicone surfaces have been imprinted with images of the ocean surface, captured by radio waves from the first ocean observation satellite, Seasat. Zooming in from the abstract scales of political economy to an intimate locality, Particular Waters then pulls us back outward to a macroscopic view of a world dominated by water, but also one made legible by satellites that likely use TSMC microchips.

15.06. 14:15 – Water: A Geoarchive (Live-Research)

Building upon her ongoing research into Water: A Geoarchive, Su Yu Hsin is excited to present a research-in-the-making that delves into the interface between Shedhalle and Lake Zurich. The site-specific exploration engages with the environmental history of Shedhalle, using polyphonic reimagining of water as a medium. Through cross-referencing with the historical cartography of the Shedhalle and sonic interventions, the surveying work is an act of recording the spatial and material dimensions of the industrial incursions into the water bodies. Central to this inquiry is the exploration of how water itself communicates the artificial filling of the site.

Splashing, seeping, and eroding, water imprints the traces of its passage, carrying the memory of where it once flowed and what it once touched. Su Yu Hsin’s research-based work is characterized by site-specific investigations into diverse water bodies, from the Akaike River in Taipei, the Liwu River in Hualian and the Salt River in Phoenix.
These projects develop contextual narratives from the perspective of the river, exploring its encompassing ecological and relational networks. Her artistic investigations examine the suppression of waterways within urban landscapes and colonial cartographic practices, as in water sleep II Akaike River under Xizhang Road (2019).

Through questioning the formatting scalar relations between the field, laboratory and database, frame of reference I & II (2020) reflects on the interplay between technology and observational networks along the river, where human and non-human elements converge. Recent works also delve into the complexities of water scarcity and the material footprint of computer technologies, as evidenced by Particular waters (2023).

Supported by Taipei Departmet of Cultural Affairs and ifa – Institut für Auslandsbeziehungen

Su Yu Hsin (b.1989) is an artist and filmmaker based in Berlin. She approaches ecology from the point of view of its close relationship with technology. Her artistic practice is strongly research-oriented and involves fieldwork where she investigates the political ecologies of water. Her work reflects on technology and the critical infrastructure in which the human and non-human converge. Her analytical and hydropoetic storytelling focuses on map-making, operational photography, and the technical production of geographical knowledge. Her video installations are exhibited worldwide in museums and International Art Biennials: Bundeskunsthalle Bonn, the Centre Pompidou-Metz, the Museum of Contemporary Art Busan, Taipei Biennial 2020 and 2023, ZKM Karlsruhe, UCCA Center for Contemporary Art, among others. Her films have been screened at Kurzfilm Festival Hamburg, EXis, Busan International Video Art Festival, and e-flux.