Wai Lun Hsu 許維倫 is a Hong Kong-born artist with a research-based practice, living and working between Hong Kong and Düsseldorf.

His practice examines how the past is recorded, told and remembered, and the gaps between them. He comes to this from Hong Kong, a city whose record has been kept and rewritten by successive administrations. His work often starts in an archive and moves outward, to sites, materials and memories. He has traced a 1941 broadcast its own broadcaster cannot confirm, a language kept mainly through missionary texts, and two hundred censored pages of a history. Hsu describes his work as a second gesture. He goes back to records that already exist, knowing no archive is complete. Revisiting them can repair or rewrite, and his work keeps that ambiguity open.

His methods are often subtractive: erasing, retouching, fragmenting. These gestures answer loss by making it visible. Artists’ books are central to this. Hsu treats a book’s material form, including its format, sequence, paper and binding, as part of its argument. Alongside books he works with sound, photography, and installation. His limited editions are presented in exhibitions and at art book fairs in Berlin, Hong Kong, Düsseldorf and Cologne.

Hsu holds an MA in Artistic Research from the Royal Academy of Art, The Hague, and a BA in Visual Arts from Hong Kong Baptist University. He is art director of mmmmor studio, where he continues to promote artists’ books and independent publishing. His books has been presented at Kunsthalle Düsseldorf; Rautenstrauch-Joest-Museum, Cologne; Tai Kwun Contemporary, and Fabrik Contemporary Art, Hong Kong ; Shanghai Duolun Museum of Modern Art; K11 Art Village, Wuhan; Soulangh Artist Village, Tainan; and Zaal 3 and Haagse Kunstkring, The Hague.