Little Things, Grand Realities

words by Christina Szu-Yin Chen

Between the end of 2024 and the beginning of 2025, as the old year gives way to the new, life is often filled with a whirlwind of activities and changes. The exhibition A Little Thing, A Grand Swing at ss space space explores the compromises and struggles inherent in daily life, portraying everyday spaces as invisible battlegrounds where conflicts and contradictions quietly unfold. Through the works of three groups of Taiwanese artists, the exhibition captures the intricacies of daily existence, transitioning from the “little” personal struggles to the “grander” chaos we inevitably contribute to and reflect.

The artist Hojan captures the ongoing struggle to balance responsibilities—an effort that often descends into disorder. This idea is conveyed through her four ceramic sculptures depicting athletes: Surfer (2024), Fencer (2024), Gymnast (2024), and Weightlifter (2024). Although athletes are typically associated with discipline and control, Hojan’s figures are portrayed with distorted facial expressions and clumsy, uncoordinated postures. This contrast emphasizes the disconnect between effort and achievement, evoking the awkwardness and frustration of striving yet falling short of expectations.

In addition to her sculptural works, Hojan’s abstract paintings further explore the complexities of human existence. Her use of bold color blocks, expressive gestures, and unconventional spatial arrangements speak to themes of struggle and resilience. One of the pieces in the exhibition, The Fleeing Feet (2024), took nearly five years to complete. It began in a dimly lit room in the United States, was put aside during a studio relocation, and was finally completed in Taiwan. Visually, the painting presents a surreal scene: a massive, distorted face—disconnected from its body—rests heavily on a small pair of feet, precariously placed on a rolling cart. This unsettling imagery evokes a sense of displacement and uncertainty as if the face is in transit with no clear destination. The exaggerated contrast between the oversized face and the tiny, fragile feet symbolizes the weight of identity, burdens, and expectations within daily life. Adding to the unease, a ghostly figure looms in the background, suggesting external pressures or inner conflicts.

In Cut It Off (2024), Hojan reflects on the overwhelming demands of life through a deeply personal experience—her inability to find time for a simple task like cutting her hair. Depicting herself hastily trimming her hair, the scattered strands become a metaphor for the chaos of daily life. The thick, textured layers of paint, interwoven with varied colors, convey a tangible sense of stress and disorder. The distorted, lifeless reflection in the mirror captures the exhaustion and frustration of trying to maintain control in an endlessly chaotic world. This painting expresses the struggle to find clarity and order in life’s relentless demands, depicting the challenge of cutting away turmoil and regaining composure.

While Hojan’s work focuses on the personal struggles of everyday life, Puwei Wu’s Kaiju Boom (2023) series takes a broader, more cinematic perspective on similar themes of chaos and order. Hojan’s introspective compositions reveal internal conflicts of identity and selfhood, whereas Wu’s works examine external forces—war, destruction, and cultural nostalgia—through the visual language of 1950s-60s Japanese tokusatsu films1. Wu’s Kaiju Boom series weaves together imagery of war, featuring fighter jets, explosions, nuclear mushroom clouds, and the iconic figure of  Godzilla (1954). Drawing inspiration from tokusatsu, Wu reimagines these aesthetics through layered collages and AI-assisted techniques. In classic tokusatsu films such as Godzilla, performers in monster suits move through intricately crafted miniature cityscapes, creating a spectacle that blurs the line between reality and fiction. Wu echoes these techniques in his work, merging traditional and digital elements to evoke a sense of hyperreality.

In the exhibition space, Wu brings cinematic techniques to life by arranging his works at varying scales and dimensions, creating an immersive, filmic environment. He meticulously recreates the ambiance of a tokusatsu film set, presenting paintings that depict actors in kaiju suits, green-screen backdrops, expressive performances, and dynamic camera angles. As moving through the space, the visitors experience thesensation of stepping onto a film set, transforming them from passive observers into active participants in Wu’s cinematic world.

Beyond its visual appeal, Wu’s work incorporates AI-generated elements into his compositions, creating a dialogue between the digital and the tangible. From my perspective, José María Lassalle’s concept of Ciberleviatán (2019) offers a valuable lens to analyze Wu’s Pixel Canyon (2024)2. The pixel grids and Godzilla’s blurred form symbolize the tension between control and chaos, representing a digital presence that both constructs and destabilizes perception. This sense of digital distortion aligns with Lassalle’s critique of a hyper-digitized world, where technology governs human experience with a disruptive influence.

Lassalle’s Ciberleviatán serves as a metaphor for the modern digital Leviathan—an all-encompassing power driven by artificial intelligence and big tech dominance. Pixel Canyon embodies this concept, illustrating the erosion of physical presence and the rise of a digitally mediated reality. Through a fusion of painterly strokes and pixelated grids, Wu echoes Lassalle’s concerns that massive digitization is not just a transformation, but a battleground where authentic human experiences are gradually replaced by virtual ones, reshaping reality and diminishing human sensitivity and autonomy. Wu’s work presents a dystopian vision of a future where technology asserts near-total control, critiquing a world where algorithms dictate human choices, and convenience comes at the cost of individuality and freedom.

While Wu’s work in Pixel Canyon presents war and destruction on a grand, technological scale, his collaboration with artist Yichia Huang in Living Stuck (2024) approaches similar themes of war from a more intimate and playful angle by starting with small-scale models. In this series, the artists explore war-related symbols deeply embedded in everyday life. The artworks feature intricate model kits of animals like horses, pigs, and chickens, juxtaposed against surreal backdrops. Through humor, the artists deconstruct familiar war-associated objects, such as toy model kits and military-themed cookware, stripping them of their conventional meanings and recontextualizing them within everyday life. In doing so, Living Stuck critiques the commercialization of war and highlights the absurdity of its presence in mundane objects.

The interplay of personal and collective struggles within the artworks deeply resonates with the exhibition’s core themes. A Little Thing, A Grand Swing questions whether, amidst destruction and chaos, there is hope for reconstruction and renewal. Through the works of three groups of Taiwanese artists, the exhibition delves into the complexities of upheaval, prompting us to consider whether a return to normalcy is truly possible—or if the chaos we navigate is an inevitable and perpetual part of our everyday lives. Is stability merely an illusion, and are we destined to continuously adapt to a world where peace and order are fleeting, if they exist at all?

1 Tokusatsu (特撮), meaning “special filming” in Japanese, is a genre of live-action film and television known for its extensive use of practical effects, such as miniature models, suitmation (actors in monster suits), and pyrotechnics. Popularized by films like Godzilla (1954), it blends visual spectacle with storytelling.

2 The term Leviatán (or Leviathan in English) originates from Thomas Hobbes’ 1651 work, where he uses the biblical sea monster as a metaphor for an all-powerful state that ensures order and security at the cost of individual freedoms. José María Lassalle reinterprets this idea for the digital age, introducing Ciberleviatán to describe the dominance of big tech corporations and artificial intelligence as a new form of control.