RE-FILMING HISTORY: SU HUI-YU BETWEEN COLOMBIA AND TAIWAN

A Total Story is the first solo exhibition in Latin America by renowned Taiwanese multimedia artist Su Hui-Yu, conceived especially for Bogotá Museum of Modern Art of Bogotá (MAMBO). Su Hui-Yu explores the tensions between memory, identity, and technology through immersive installations that fuse archive, fiction, and performance. His practice centers on the concept of “re-shooting,” an aesthetic strategy that reinterprets historical materials to revisit taboos, misunderstood events, and Taiwan’s cultural narratives.

For this exhibition, Su transforms the Museum into a film studio during the first three opening days, incorporating new footage into an ongoing cinematic project. With a hypersaturated, baroque, and psychedelic aesthetic, A Total Story turns visitors into active participants in a universe where mass media become tools to reimagine collective memory.

His filmic project, titled A Continuous Story, revolves around the creation of history and narrative — revisiting collective memory and opening the door to new forms of imagination. It departs from a central question:in this monumentalist history, who is included and who has been left out? How can history be told in its entirety?

Inspired by Su Hui-Yu’s previous film/exhibition project The Trio Hall (2023), this film-performance once again examines the complex relationships between technology and Taiwan’s social, ideological, historical, and geopolitical landscapes. The country has gained global significance not only for its central role in semiconductor and technology production but also for its leadership in cybersecurity and hacktivism, building a participatory system of governance where open-source civic technology and citizen inclusion in decision-making are essential to its democracy.

In this exhibition, Su and guest artist Cheng Hsien-Yu present a new performance during the opening, intertwining the historical contexts of Colombia and Taiwan to explore how history, capitalism, technology, and geopolitics shape the present. In Bogotá, the project takes a new turn — becoming a meditation on who participates in history, both on and off screen. The film crew is led by filmmaker and artivist J Triangular (he/they), serving as executive producer, alongside a stellar cast including Jahira Quintero, La Morena del Chicamocha, DEM, Matilda González Gil, and Brigitte Baptiste, among others.

In addition to new works The Total Story and The Trio Hall, the exhibition includes both earlier and recent series by Su Hui-Yu: The Space Warriors and the Digigrave (2023/2025), The Women’s Revenge (2020), The Walker (2017), and Life, Pleasure, and the Reading Room (2017).

Su reflects on how Taiwan — influenced over centuries by various empires (Han Chinese, Dutch, Spanish, French, Japanese, and Chiang Kai-shek’s Kuomintang) — has, since its democratization in the 1990s, transformed into a crucial actor in the global technology and computing network. This transformation has both enriched the nation and placed it in a precarious position within the geopolitical tensions of competing superpowers.

In Bogotá, this film-performance revisits key moments in Colombian history, weaving together memory, imagination, and resistance.

Su Hui-Yu (b. Taipei, 1976) is a Taiwanese artist known for his multimedia works exploring the relationship between mass media, pop culture, and Taiwan’s postcolonial history. His art often revisits and reinterprets historical and cultural events through techniques such as “re-shooting,” using digital tools to deconstruct themes of censorship, identity, and the impact of social ideology. He holds an MFA from the Taipei National University of the Arts and has exhibited widely at the international level.

The Total Story will be on view until February 15, 2026, at MAMBO, located at Calle 24 #6-00, in downtown Bogotá, Colombia.

*Cover image: courtesy of MAMBO.