Particular waters, 2023, film installation, 18 minutes, 35 seconds, at G2 Schaulager, Leipzig. Courtesy of the artist and alexander levy, Berlin. Photo: Felix Brenner.
Su Yu-Hsin is a Taiwanese artist and filmmaker based in Berlin whose extensive research and fieldwork focuses on relations between ecology and technology, specifically through the politics of water. The Taipei Biennial 2023 features Su Yu-Hsin’s film installation Particular Waters (2023), addressing the water network in Hsinchu, home of the world’s most sought-after chipmaker, Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC). TSMC’s ultra-high-precision process of “printing” microchips with light has enabled dizzying technological growth for humanity as a whole, while also famously serving as a strategic “silicon shield” securing Taiwan’s prosperity as well as guarding against existential threats.
Perhaps counterintuitively, Su Yu-Hsin proposes a material awareness of what TSMC’s success in the planetary domains of global supply chains and geopolitics means for the people and ecology of Hsinchu itself. Chip manufacturing consumes an enormous volume of water. Where does that water come from? Who gains access to it, and on what terms? Given that the growth of TSMC has been much more predictable than the rainfall in Taiwan in the past decades, what are the ecological consequences of industrial exuberance and extraction? Particular Waters addresses these questions through storytelling, reconstructing Hsinchu’s 2021 drought from the perspective of a female water truck driver. The installation includes “dummy wafers”—used to test machines used in semiconductor production—whose silicone surfaces have been imprinted with images of the ocean surface, captured by radio waves from the first ocean observation satellite, Seasat. Zooming in from the abstract scales of political economy to an intimate locality, Particular Waters then pulls us back outward to a macroscopic view of a world dominated by water, but also one made legible by satellites that likely use TSMC microchips.
