Hung-Fu Tsai
蔡宏輔writing
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The Contemporary Cowboy Archive
2025Installation
wood, glass, zinc, ink, leather, printed text on paper
The Contemporary Cowboy Archive examines how the romanticized image of the cowboy has travelled through Western films, popular culture, and Japanese animation, where it has been reinterpreted across cultures and carried into contemporary everyday life. The work constructs an imaginary character whose identity is assembled through objects, gestures, clothing, brands, and personal rituals.
Presented as a fictional archival collection, it brings together zinc armor-like replicas of the character’s belongings, including gloves, keys, cigarettes, Levi's badges, and tattooed feet. Archival-style descriptions transform these imagined objects into seemingly preserved artifacts from a future past.
By adopting the language of the museum archive, the work blurs the boundaries between artifact and fiction, documentation and storytelling. It questions how objects acquire value, authenticity, and historical significance, while also examining the institutional authority to determine what is preserved, classified, and remembered.
These zinc plate prints emerged as part of the making process, becoming meaningful traces of the archive.