Hung-Fu Tsai
蔡宏輔
cv
biography
contact
Lines of Position
I was born to isolate; there's a monster within
The Contemporary Cowboy Archive
On the Cusp of Wandering
Permanent Nipples
I'm Afraid of Bricks
Workshops
Floral Bodies
I'm Afraid of Bricks
2023
In-situ work
calligraphy on printed paper
This in-situ work explores how materials and cultural forms acquire, lose, and transform meaning as they move across different colonial and cultural contexts. It takes Museum Het Schip as a point of departure, one of the most prominent examples of the Amsterdam School, recognised for its expressive use of red brick, sculptural forms, and elaborate ornamentation.
The Amsterdam School developed within the context of the Netherlands’ colonial relationship with Indonesia, then known as the Dutch East Indies. Indonesian architecture, crafts, materials, and visual culture influenced the movement’s expressive language. At Museum Het Schip, architectural forms and ornamental details demonstrate how cultural references can be translated into a new visual language. Forms originating in specific cultural contexts become incorporated into architecture, where their original meanings can become obscured by their new aesthetic function.
This history led me to consider the movement and changing meaning of brick in Taiwan. During Dutch colonial rule in the seventeenth century, brick became an important material in colonial construction. Fort Zeelandia (熱蘭遮城), the centre of Dutch military and political power in Taiwan, represented the authority, wealth, and permanence of the colonial regime. After the Dutch left, parts of the fort were dismantled and its bricks were reused by local residents to build and repair houses and fences. A material associated with colonial power was consequently absorbed into domestic life, carrying traces of one political history into another context.
I respond to these histories through the traditional Chinese Spring Festival couplet. Traditionally placed around the entrances of homes during Lunar New Year, couplets combine writing, imagery, colour, and architecture. Their meaning is inseparable from their linguistic and cultural context, while their visual form also functions as decoration.
For this work, I created a series of Spring Festival couplets specifically for Museum Het Schip. The texts and imagery are deliberately satirical, referring to the history of colonialism, the role of brick in Taiwan, and the decorative language of the Amsterdam School. By using the familiar visual language of festive decoration to carry critical content, I turn the function of the couplet against itself. What appears to be a traditional New Year ornament becomes a vehicle for addressing histories of colonial power and cultural displacement.
The couplets are installed directly onto the architecture of Museum Het Schip, which remains partly residential. Their placement echoes the relationship between traditional couplets and domestic architecture, while simultaneously introducing another cultural and historical context into the building. The work therefore creates a deliberate collision between Taiwanese cultural symbolism and a Dutch architectural language shaped by colonial cultural exchange.
For viewers who cannot read Chinese, the texts may initially appear primarily as decorative signs. Their content remains hidden within the visual form of the ornament, creating a tension between what is seen and what is being said. This linguistic distance becomes an important part of the work, as the couplets can be consumed aesthetically while their critical meaning remains inaccessible.
By bringing these two histories of cultural displacement into the same architectural space, the work uses decoration as a form of critique. It questions how cultural forms can be detached from their histories and transformed into aesthetic language, while also asking whether decoration can be reclaimed as a space for memory, satire, and resistance.