By drawing out unusual conversations between the frog god Marshal Tie Jia and the artist, this work is an attempt to map the creation and disappearance of myth, image, culture, and history from both the contemporary modernist context and a more ancient and mysterious perspective.

Marshal Tie Jia, who was born more than 1000 years ago in Jiangxi, China and lost his temple in the Wuyi Mountains during the Cultural Revolution, is currently exiled on Turtle Island, a tiny islet between Taiwan and China that came under the jurisdiction of the former after Chiang Kai-Shek’s retreat to Taiwan. After an accidental encounter with Marshal Tie Jia, Hsu decided to unfold the conjunction of modernity and myth by depicting the pond where the frog god was born in the night and the island where he currently resides in daylight. The film is shot in these two sites and accompanied by both Nuo dance, an ancient exorcism ritual that shares the same roots as the frog beliefs, and Min opera, the Marshal’s current favorite entertainment. Instructions and comments on the production are given by the Marshal. Documentation of the correspondence between the Marshal and Hsu are also on display, including a poem that the god wrote to Hsu on the altar table.

As the difference between fact and fiction seems to disappear and the modern nation state’s appropriation of history and memory is revealed through discovering a living myth, Hsu creates narratives through image, text, and installation to untether the formation of cultural identity from its preceding attachments. Green screen techniques are employed to transport and mediate different sensations of space-time amongst people, gods, and materials. Imagery from the film, the installation, and the play based on the project’s research become key elements of the structure of the new artistic myth of Marshal Tie Jia: the magical stories and political background ebb away, and the narrative becomes a means to transcribe an imagination of life.

Hsu is interested in the forgotten histories of the Cold War in Asia. His works develop a keen sensitivity that weaves together reality and illusion, history and the present by building a circuit of events in the hors-champ of people and places off the screen of history.