HSU Fong-Ray is a Taipei-based curator and art writer whose work focuses on the operational relations between contemporary art institutions and cultural production. He began engaging in curatorial and spatial practices within Taiwanese contemporary art while studying at the Graduate Institute of Arts Management and Cultural Policy at Taipei National University of the Arts. In 2012, he received a curatorial grant from the National Culture and Arts Foundation. Over the past sixteen years, he has worked across independent art institutions, independent curatorial practice, art criticism, and gallery management, while the past decade has been primarily devoted to curatorial and directorial roles within gallery structures. Through long-term practical experience, he has developed a critical understanding of the mechanisms of artistic production, the role of the curator, and the operational structures of art institutions. Within processes of institutionalization, the curator confronts not only the continuity of cultural production, but also the ways institutional and managerial logics reshape curatorial practice. For HSU Fong-Ray, the necessity of repositioning curatorial practice within these conditions has therefore become an unavoidable concern.

The value of curating, for HSU Fong-Ray, does not lie in the production of exhibitions as singular forms, but in the possibility of constructing reflective modes of knowledge and perception. His exhibitions collectively form a trajectory of inquiry and thought. In Times of Unauthorized Occupancy: A Restated History of Treasure Hill, he examined how exhibitions, once absorbed into cultural governance, automatically acquire the authority to speak on behalf of a place, positioning curating in relation not only to history, but also to cultural governance itself. In DisOrder / Exhibition / in Order, legal contracts were used to displace the functions of a museum and a furniture store, temporarily suspending the institutional role of the museum and relocating artistic production into the unpredictable coordinates of a commercial furniture space. During the global paralysis brought about by COVID-19, 1D31 Online: Back-end investigated how international art fairs continued to operate through digital platforms, exposing the hidden structures between the art market and networked systems. Meanwhile, 2018 Taiwan International Video Art Exhibition – Offline Browser sought to rethink perceptual relations between humans, technology, and networks through the arrangement of flows and nodes. Together, these projects have formed HSU Fong-Ray’s curatorial position, responding to the ways institutions, history, and technology shape structures of governance.