/ Stories of the Everyday — Within the Realm of Jianghu

Stories of the Everyday: Within the Realm of Jianghu unfolds starting January 1, 2026, at ALIEN ALL DAY LOUNGE, located on the second floor of ALIEN ART CENTRE.

This exhibition continues the conceptual core carried by the architecture of ALIEN ART CENTRE itself — exploring how art, within a historical building, forms relationships with time, the body, and everyday experience.

Artist Tsung-Hsuan Hsu (許棕宣), previously selected for the Taiwan Pavilion of the Venice Architecture Biennale, currently teaches in the Department of Architecture at Shih Chien University and the Graduate Institute of Architecture and Art at Tainan National University of the Arts. His practice spans architectural design, artistic practice, and writing, and has long focused on the textures of life beyond structure and everyday narratives at the margins of institutional systems. These concerns resonate deeply, on a conceptual level, with ALIEN ART CENTRE — a contemporary site transformed from a military history. This exhibition does not seek to “place” works into a space, but rather attempts to align creation, architecture, and environment with one another, generating possibilities for viewing within a rhythm close to everyday life.

ALIEN ART CENTRE was once a temporary stop for soldiers before their departure to offshore islands. This history endows the building with a particular sense of time: not as a destination, but as a place of transition. Waiting, gathering, and dispersal once constituted daily life here. This spatial experience has become a foundational reference for curatorial thinking at ALIEN ART CENTRE: how might staying, viewing, and perception be re-understood within a building originally designed for transience.

The artist’s work Zoo further echoes the geographical context of ALIEN ART CENTRE. Located directly behind the site is Shoushan Zoo, where forest and city intersect. Animals here are not merely objects of viewing, but are part of the area’s everyday landscape — animals that frequently appear in the museum’s backyard, such as monkeys, owls, and stray cats, sharing this land with visitors. In this environment of human and non-human coexistence, “looking,” “being looked at,” and “boundaries” are no longer abstract concepts, but experiences enacted within daily life.

Looking back at the exhibition history of ALIEN ART CENTRE, the institution has presented many artists closely engaged with architecture, space, and structure, including Yasumichi Morita and Chih-Sheng Lai, continuously exploring how art can intervene in space and transform modes of perception.

The recent special exhibition The Bards of Time and Space further reinforced the simplification of structure and the deepening of perception through geometric abstraction and reductive spatial imagery, combined with additive processes of time and bodily accumulation, allowing viewing to become an experience closely attuned to the body. This resonates with Hsu’s approach, in which creation becomes a bodily form of addition — not the stacking of forms, but the accumulation of time through repetition, labor, and a sense of scale. As the artist notes:

“This jianghu exists beyond the reach of the eye; the vastness of this jianghu can only be measured by the body.”

The “jianghu” he attends to is not a distant legend, but a condition embedded in the fissures of everyday life; relationships that cannot be grasped at a glance, and can only be measured through walking, staying, and repeated perception.


The Textual Basis of Within the Realm of Jianghu

Within the Realm of Jianghu is a practice of continuous return — a repeated measuring and writing of one’s own condition. Within the Realm of Jianghu is a literary work by the artist; the two works presented in this exhibition, General’s Village and The Zoo, both originate from this text. Within the Realm of Jianghu does not attempt to define “jianghu,” but instead transforms it into a state of existence in the process of becoming: neither fully within order, nor ever truly outside it. When “jianghu” is condensed into the perceivable “li” (里), the everyday ceases to be merely a repetitive backdrop and instead becomes a site where stories are continuously generated.

What the works leave behind is not a conclusion, but a distance still in expansion — a distance that must be measured by the body. In Stories of the Everyday: Within the Realm of Jianghu, Hsu regards literary writing as an indeterminate spatial condition rather than narrative content to be faithfully represented. Here, text does not function as explanation, but as a generative logic latent within the structure of the works — determining how forms emerge, how relationships are arranged, and influencing the viewer’s rhythm of movement and posture of viewing upon entering the space.

General’s Village

General’s Village does not establish a place that can be geographically located, but rather a structural condition formed through mishearing, misunderstanding, and collective imagination. The grid-like framework appears to point toward order and classification, yet instead reveals the contingency and power relations embedded in acts of naming. The heterogeneous objects placed within it neither fully submit to the structure nor attempt to escape it; like sounds and events that repeatedly surface in daily life, they quietly rewrite what was once regarded as a stable center. The space thus continually oscillates between being “regulated” and being “disturbed.”

The Zoo

The Zoo further brings the act of viewing itself into the foreground. The field formed by circular grids is both enclosed and transparent, allowing the “cage” to become a structure that can be entered rather than a one-directional path. Within it, people continuously shift roles — viewer, viewed, imitator, performer — as identities are repeatedly affirmed only to be immediately dismantled through the overlapping of circles. This zoo without animals does not point toward nature, but toward humanity’s deep-seated desire for order, classification, and self-positioning.

Through Stories of the Everyday: Within the Realm of Jianghu, we encounter a form of everyday writing unfolding within architecture. Within ALIEN ART CENTRE — a space that once bore the experiences of military waiting and dispersal — stories no longer point toward heroes or events, but return to scales reachable by the body. Here, we are not merely viewers, but individuals passing through the jianghu.

.
Within ALIEN ALL DAY LOUNGE, a site situated between the art museum and everyday life, Stories of the Everyday: Within the Realm of Jianghu does not aim for viewers to fully comprehend a complete narrative, but instead invites each visit to become a brief yet genuine moment of staying. Works and architecture, circulation and sightlines, materials and bodies form a low-key yet continuously operating relationship, making viewing no longer a matter of facing an artwork, but an experience co-produced with space.

When the exhibition takes “jianghu” as its name yet chooses to anchor itself in “li,” it points not toward distant imagination, but toward the scales and distances we pass through daily without necessarily noticing. Here, stories are not completed, but held in reserve; meaning is not fixed, but left open to perception. Perhaps it is precisely in this state that the exhibition sustains its dialogue with ALIEN ART CENTRE — a site that once carried waiting and transition — allowing each visitor, in the act of walking, to find their own place of anchorage.


Artist Biography

Tsung-Hsuan Hsu (許棕宣) is an architectural creator and currently an Associate Professor in the Department of Architecture at Shih Chien University. He holds a Master’s degree in Architecture from the Graduate Institute of Architecture and Art, Tainan National University of the Arts, and has professional training in architecture and interior spatial design. His practice spans architecture, spatial design, and artistic creation, with a long-standing focus on the relationship between site, dwelling, and everyday life. His work has been selected for the 9th Venice Architecture Biennale — Taiwan Pavilion, and he received First Prize in the planning competition for the Sanzhan Service Center, Taroko National Park. His work and research have been published in Taiwan Architecture, Contemporary Design, and Artco, among others. He has presented or participated in exhibitions at venues including Kaohsiung Museum of Fine Arts, Jut Art Museum, Weiwuying National Kaohsiung Center for the Arts, and High Box If Theater. In recent years, he has continued to engage in public art, residential, and cultural space projects, as well as industry–academia collaborations such as the Ministry of Education’s student housing improvement initiatives.