The Politics of Love and Memory in Mimian Hsu’s Work at NUNU Fine Art New York
By Yohanna M Roa
Installation image of Mimian Hsu: Everyone is Asking at Nunu Fine Art, New York, 2025. Photo by Martin Seck. Courtesy of Nunu Fine Art.
In Mimian Hsu’s work, politics manifests as a gesture of love. This idea is essential to understanding Everyone is Asking, her first solo exhibition at NUNU Fine Art in New York, presented under the Project Space: Asian Voices program. Through reconstructing historical memory via intimacy and affection, Hsu unfolds an artistic practice that reweaves the family fabric as an act of preservation, resilience, and reclamation. The artist invites us to contemplate her Taiwanese-Latin American heritage and transcends her personal experience to reach a macro-structural dimension that speaks to the collective pains and absences shaping history and the present.
This exhibition is a loving tribute to her paternal grandfather, who disappeared during Taiwan’s brutal political repression known as the White Terror, a dark era imposed by Chiang Kai-shek following the February 28 Massacre of 1947. Her grandfather’s disappearance is more than a biographical fact; it is the void that forms the core from which Hsu weaves her visual and sonic narrative. However, unlike other stories of absence that emphasize loss alone, Hsu transforms this void into a living, active, and transformative space.
The artist employs drawing, memory, language, and sound to fill these familial “gaps,” which simultaneously reference far-reaching social and political issues. This gesture is both intimate and universal, as by reconnecting her personal story with diaspora and uprooting, Hsu sustains a healing process that acknowledges how political wounds transcend the individual and affect the daily lives of those forced to migrate, abandon their land and redefine their senses of belonging.
Mimian Hsu, Hsu Zheng Breathing, unique Digital Print, 24 x 16 in | 61 x 40.6 cm. Photo by Martin Seck. Courtesy of Nunu Fine Art.
The fabric Hsu constructs is deeply human. Traditional Chinese calligraphy, partially taught by her father, is not merely an aesthetic or technical practice here; it becomes a ritual act interwoven with the exuberance and vitality of Latin American tropics. In her drawings and installations, the precision and discipline of Eastern script merge with the natural choreography of salsa and merengue and the colors and light characteristic of Costa Rica’s Caribbean coast. This fusion is a robust visual dialogue and a metaphor for the cultural and political mestizaje that defines her lived experience.
At the heart of the exhibition stands an installation composed of 28,125 bells, each representing a day passed since her grandfather’s disappearance until the most recent anniversary. Through its visual and sonic rhythm, this work becomes a living totem, an affective archive that expands over time, adding 325 bells annually. Through this act of accumulation, memory is revived and sustained—it becomes a shared heartbeat, a collective act of resistance.
Hsu’s political gesture is thus understood as an exercise in love and care. Positioned within her hybrid identity and diasporic experience, she creates art that speaks not only of loss and absence but also of continuity, emotional rootedness, and transformation. Home, conceived not merely as a physical space but as a network of memories, languages, and rituals, emerges in her work as a refuge, a place sustained by memory, family, and living traditions.
In an interview, this intricate weave becomes even clearer. Hsu explains how she grew up in a household where Mandarin was the primary language and Asian cuisine shaped family routines, yet where Costa Rican and Latin American experiences infused her daily life with their light, colors, and sounds. This coexistence of diverse worlds was never a source of conflict for her but rather a richness, an integrative, vital experience that permeates all her work.
The calligraphy learned in Saturday classes and refined in workshops in Taiwan, transmitted by her father, is far more than a formal exercise. In Hsu’s art, calligraphy is a living language, a bridge connecting past and present, tradition and personal experience, and a history marked by political violence. Calligraphy intertwines with dance, salsa, and merengue in a visual choreography that recalls the artist’s multiple roots and her modes of resisting history and memory.
Mimian Hsu, Hsu Zheng Sleighbells, 2025, installation of 28,125 sleighbells, variable. Photo by Martin Seck. Courtesy of Nunu Fine Art.
The project is dedicated to her grandfather, who disappeared two weeks after the student massacre of February 28, 1947. This absent paternal figure, an intellectual unjustly accused and forcibly disappeared for political reasons, serves as an axis from which Hsu formulates questions about absence, waiting, and memory. How does one inhabit that void? How can one share a breath with someone who was never physically present? What does keeping a legacy alive despite violence and imposed silence mean?
These questions do not seek definitive answers. On the contrary, for the artist, art is a space for open-ended questioning—a collective and internal dialogue that keeps history and its current impact alive. The work becomes a form of resistance and healing, where the macro-structural history of the White Terror is translated into personal and familial experiences that shape daily life and identity.
A photograph from the performance, in which the artist projects her grandfather’s face onto her own to share breath, powerfully symbolizes this dialogue between generations, between absences and presences, past and present. This embodied act, this shared breath, constitutes a memory practice also rooted in Latin American and Taiwanese ancestral traditions, where rituals connecting with the dead sustain life and love.
The cultural mixture Hsu embodies is not merely a formal or aesthetic theme but a way of being in the world, transcending the dichotomy between Asian and Latin American identities. In her work, Eastern calligraphic tradition dances with tropical exuberance, family memories intertwine with political issues, and drawing becomes a language of resistance and affection. Politics, thus, becomes an act of love, preserving lineage and reclaiming memory as a space for healing and transformation.
Mimian Hsu, Everyone is Asking, polyptych, calligraphy and Ink, each 23 x 17 1/4 in | 58.4 x 43.8 cm. Photo by Martin Seck. Courtesy of Nunu Fine Art.
Everyone is Asking challenges viewers to engage with a country’s history through the lens of family history. It is also an invitation to understand how the personal and the affective are essential dimensions for approaching historical memory and politics. Mimian Hsu reminds us through her work that memory and care are vital forces that can traverse pain and loss, building bridges across generations and territories and sowing possible futures grounded in love and resistance.
Exhibition open through June 14, 2025. NUNU Fine Art, NYC
