Faces (2025)
Seeking Shade in the Desert (2025)
Muted Pink Desert
(2025)
from ab to zu
(2025)
You do not need to worry about what we said (2024–2025)
A Piece of History (2024)
Flee Ye Into Another (2024)
At The Time When (2024)
Between Faces, Stories and Power (2023)
flo-o-o (2023)
The State of Being Vanished (2021)
dok dat dap dap (2021)
I am not a robot (2020–2021)
The Rise of Modern China (2018)
Affirmative Resonance (2018)
‘Parts’ of China (2017)
Transliterations (2017)
Ximplification of a Language (2016)
A Living Space: Houses (2014–15)
Breathe (2012)
Circle (2011)
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Muted Pink Desert
06.12.2025
Artist Residency Open Studio
Wai Lun Hsu, Lai Ping So
Arizona, United States
work statements
Faces
Wai Lun Hsu
Sculptures, Installation
Arizona, December 2025
The work examines how early 20th-century photography shaped colonial perceptions of Native peoples rather than documenting them.
Edward S. Curtis's The North American Indian (1907–1930) produced over 40,000 photographs across more than 80 Nations, staging romanticized images that presented Indigenous disappearance as natural rather than the result of deliberate policies during an era of systematic cultural destruction.
This work examines how ethnographic projects categorized and studied human beings as objects. It includes stones carved into faces without explicit identity. These ambiguous portraits counter Curtis’s images, which fixed a narrow impression of Native peoples that persists despite being far from the whole truth.
work statements
Seeking Shade in the Desert
Wai Lun Hsu
Photobook
Arizona, December 2025
This is a leporello photobook compiled from the photos taken during this residency.
The scorching sun shines indifferently. We seek shade in the desert, as if searching for protection in a world where survival depends on shelter. Much like young saguaros growing beneath nurse trees, we find refuge from sunburn and frost under an older tree.
This act of seeking shade echoes impermanence: the nurse tree quietly shelters the young saguaro, but as the saguaro grows, it draws more water and resources, sometimes leading to the death of the older tree.
These photos are the accumulation of the experiences and impressions I gathered over two months in the Sonoran Desert, Arizona. Some moments appear in images, others don’t.
Seeking shade in the desert, seeking shade in history: seeking the forgotten memories and underexposed narratives that haunt this landscape. These shades remind us that the past/history is not absent but obscured. To seek shade is to acknowledge our vulnerability.
