Biography

Jane V Hsu 徐蓁 has spent her 30-year career rallying communities. She started collecting banned Chinese documentary films for Columbia University Library that led to house arrest in Beijing. She then produced the largest museum block parties in New York City that celebrated emerging contemporary art and local cultures. Jane has led major New York institutions like the New Museum of Contemporary Art and the Rubin Museum of Himalayan Art and holds a BFA from The Cooper Union in video and performance art, and an MA in film studies from Columbia University. Now residing in the mountains of the Eastern Sierra, she is committed to fostering a vibrant cultural landscape that inspires creativity and connection.

Artist Statement
My work explores the intersection of natural spaces and living performance, revisiting the everyday through cyclical rhythms and narrative. I'm fascinated by how environment and experience trigger interaction and thought across species. For example, the sunset, a universal daily event, marks endings and beginnings. I collect the silences and conversations that arise during these fleeting moments of interaction with the natural world and internal narratives, revealing the profound in the everyday. My body of work speaks to our shared obsession with predicting life's narrative, seeking patterns, finding security in the known, and anxiety in the unknown.

On “Performing Failure”
There’s power in failure. It's not just failing; it's choosing to appear to fail, premeditating the opposite of success. This can be a subversive strategy, challenging expectations and exposing hidden structures. Like Lucky's calculated falls in Waiting for Godot, it's a performance. By feigning incompetence, the performer can deflect attention, lower defenses, or manipulate perceptions. It's a delicate balance, blurring the line between simulation and reality. Ultimately, "performing failure" reveals the constructed nature of success, suggesting that accomplishment is often as much a performance as the act of failing.

Our discomfort with duplicates and simulations touches on how we perceive reality and our place within it. "Performing failure" plays with this unease. Why does it feel unsettling to realize your friend has a twin? We crave authenticity, believing our experiences and selves are unique, our successes (and failures) genuinely our own. Duplicates challenge this, suggesting our reality is merely a copy or construct. If reality is so easily replicated, what of our experiences' value? By blurring genuine and simulated failure, it forces us to question success itself. If failure can be faked, how can we trust our achievements aren't also performances? 

Selected Exhibitions (PDF download)
Professional Resume (PDF download)