“Today I will choose hope”

TaikaTalk with Hsiao-Chi Chu

Hsiao-Chi Chu is a Taiwanese cross-disciplinary practitioner working at the intersection of art, cultural heritage, migration, and humanitarian development. She has field experience across Asia, Africa, and Europe, including Mongolia, Palestine, Cambodia, Eswatini, and the Netherlands. Her practice spans exhibition curation, socially-engaged art, cultural research, human rights advocacy, and international NGO work. 

Hsiao-Chi co-founded  Refugee Path and Refugee Week Taiwan, initiatives that promote inclusive engagement with forced displacement and global issues in Taiwan. She also founded GRENSGEWEEFD NL, an art, culture, and sustainability consultancy based in the Netherlands. She was a Visiting Fellow at the International Institute for Asian Studies (IIAS), Leiden University, from June 2025 to May 2026. Currently she is a Research Lead  and Sustainability Advisor at the Taiwan Art Space Alliance. She is also the author of The Forgotten Heritage of Palestine (2023).

You work cross-media and across sectors in the field of socially engaged arts, social justice and humanitarian issues. How did your inter-disciplinary approach come about?

To begin with, my educational background is across different sectors. My bachelor’s degree is in finance. In the university, I joined theater groups and the program for the arts. I started to think that I want to work with people, not just be stuck in the bank. Around that time, I also got in a car accident. This experience and the recovery period made me realise how art provides me with a lot of energy.

I slowly started to work in the field of artist residencies. I got a job at AIR Taipei, which is the biggest institutional arts foundation in Taiwan with government funding. They have three types of artist residency: one is in an urban area, one in the local village community, and the third one is in the mountains. I learned a lot from how we can engage with people with art as a medium. So that was my starting point with art.

What made you focus on socially-engaged arts particularly?

After a while, while working at AIR Taipei, I started to feel like I lacked knowledge for the whole field. So, I did a master’s degree in art education in National Taipei University of the Arts. That is where I started to think about maybe someday running some arts projects myself.

In university, I started to do socially-engaged art with a traumatized experiences group at a veterans’ house with people who had lived through the atrocities of the Korean War period. We worked with elderly men at the end of their life. I organised activities with them using food, painting, textile work and gardening. That is the second point where I realised that I really want to do social practice and not only be stuck in a museum.

I even find artist residencies to be closed spaces sometimes. It’s a comfort zone for artists. I am an inter-sectors person that works across different fields. I want to know more about how to practice art outside the studio, in the world, not only just create artworks in our own space.

What is socially-engaged artistic practice for you? How do you work with it?

My focus point for socially-engaged practice is based on my own strengths. I come from different sectors: culture and arts sector, museum sector, humanitarian sector and NGO sector with focus in different programmes from sanitation to education and agriculture. I am interested in how I could integrate these different sectors and to change their ways of project implementation.

Particularly I started to think about bringing the socially-engaged element into NGOs. Of course, in the beginning, it was very difficult to communicate within the NGOs because they have their own language and I have my own language. Especially the social workers and psychologists were doubtful because they could not see how impact could be created immediately and therefore saw the suggestions as a waste of money.

It took a few years of patient communication. Slowly, the NGOs started to change how they work with locals. It is not only about bringing the infrastructure and the money to communities and building something for them. In those cases, the locals are dependent on the NGOs instead of becoming independent. Instead, I think about social engagement as empowerment of others. 

When working with social justice and humanitarian issues, there is unfortunately a kind of “unfinishedness”  present in the work. There is always something old or new to place your focus on. What is your relationship with the unfinishedness of the work, and does it matter to you?

In the beginning of my career, the unfinishedness did matter to me. I wanted to finish something, and to see the result of what had been done. I slowly found out, however, that when I do socially-engaged arts, they do not exactly have a clearly measurable result. I decided to accept that.

However, that does not mean that it is all for nothing. The work continues. Someone can be continuously inspired by the thoughts and perspective that came from a project and continues to do something. For me, that is quite important. I always wonder about how I can empower others. I try to think about everything I do as a kind of teamwork. We live our lives as individuals, but we are part of communities and of society. It is important to me that we inspire each other to keep doing things. If I want to make a huge impact, as an individual artist alone it is very difficult.

In art, sometimes we want to make a difference by creating something very big, like a resistance movement. In other sectors, that kind of thinking would be seen as too big of an aim.

Your experience includes NGO work, project management and socially-engaged art with very hands-on practices such as gardening. Next to all this you also do artistic research, and you have a curatorial practice. What is their role in responding to the issues that matter to you?

In curation work, I try to create a kind of networking platform. During Covid-19 I started to raise up the idea for refugee week Taiwan. Because in Taiwan we don’t exactly have refugee law which is really tricky. In that process, I started to think about how I could bridge different people from journalists to artists, who all have a focus on the same issue. I started to develop this new platform for everyone to play together, to enjoy and have conversations. From then on, the question for me has been how can I raise awareness by curation? How can I take action to talk to the public?

There is one theory called art-based research, which is based on the idea that if you are an artist, you are also kind of a teacher and a researcher. So, there is this triangle, and you are shifting positions all the time. My idea for curation arises from this thinking. I also think about curation as art-based research. As a curator you will bring lots of people together. The exhibition becomes kind of like a classroom or a story book for visitors to take part in.

Where does the drive for your work and the issues you tackle stem from?

Many people ask me this question. I feel it’s my personality. When I was young, I really loved to talk to people. I loved to go outside, play in the forest and go hiking in the mountains. I wanted to explore the surroundings and hear the birds and the monkeys. I was wondering how I could have a conversation with the surroundings.

When I read history books, I wondered, why is this book written in this context, but another book is written in another way even though they talk about the same issue? I also saw different people suffering. I started to think about the inequality all over the world. Why are societal structures and institutional systems so different? How could I involve myself in making some changes? So, it all stems from my curious personality.

I think many can attest that there is some numbness in the air as we are facing a magnitude of global and local issues, and even catastrophes today. Where do you find the stamina to keep on going with your work?

Some people say I’m a little bit idealistic when it comes to my view on continuing life in difficult situations. If we don’t think positively, and we only focus on suffering, that will keep us stuck. What I have learned from my work in refugee camps and conflict areas is that one should not get stuck with the difficulties but just find a way to keep going. Even in traumatising situations time keeps moving forward and things keep moving forward. Someone, or something, will catch you. That is what I believe now.

I am thinking a lot about how we can build up our capacity for resilience, be it in communities or NGOs themselves. For me, this is quite important now. In the past, I was always thinking project-by-project, but now I am interested in how we can really enhance our long-term resilience capacity. That is also a core question keeping in mind the sustainability of things. Thinking should go beyond projects – it is a deeper kind of mindset.

In the past I would not have spoken about hope, but today I will choose hope. Hope is not necessarily produced by big changes. It can be very small things in our lives that give us hope and stamina to keep going.  

How about in your personal life, what kind of art are you drawn to? What kind of artworks give you comfort and keep you company?

I don’t know why, but in recent years I have started to go back to classical art, like for instance old paintings. Recently, I went to the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam again. I have started to appreciate those paintings from maybe 200 years ago. I have become interested in how artists during the past have observed their life. Maybe the lighting in those pictures is different from today and it is also particular how they draw people’s mundane life. Many of the paintings from the past are based on the daily lives of the people during that time.

It doesn’t mean I have abandoned contemporary art at all. But nowadays I feel that contemporary art can be a little bit ideologist. Maybe some artists only do something because they want to do it, and there is no other reason. I feel that contemporary art has lost connection with the local context, which feels more vivid in these old paintings.

Hsiao-Chi Chu was talking with Silja Tuovinen during the TRACKS + PRACTICES Symposium in Oulu August 2026.