Future Shock

作品賞析

Su Hui-Yu specializes in video, photography, and installation art. In recent years, he has opened up multiple dialogues with past, present, and future by revisiting the past or unfinished things. The inspiration for this work, as well as the title, comes from the famous book Future Shock by the American futurist Alvin Toffler, and he sampled the book’s ideas about what the future might look like. He shot the film in Kaohsiung, turning the book’s predictions about the future into scenes, choosing to use 1970s-era industrial facilities, modern buildings, and power plants to present the traces of urban modernization, and to look back at the “modern” and the “future” from the perspective of the past in order to re-understand the imagined future. Interestingly, for some viewers, the images of the work will tell of the past, while for other viewers they will describe the present, even though they originate from a futurist’s book written more than 50 years ago.