5 things to know about Musquiqui Chihying

Through his work across installation, video and photography, he explores the impact of technology advancement on everyday life and human behaviours, desires and thoughts. 

A Life of Navigation, Chihying’s first UK solo exhibition, brings together four of his multi-media works in our Hayward Gallery’s HENI Project Space. Here are five things to know about an artist you may be yet to discover.

His early works are humorous, playful and idiosyncratic

The artist’s early works were characterised by a playful and performative language, adopted to investigate the convenience and stress of modern urban life.

In the two-channel video The Jog (2014) Chihying is seen dressed in athletic gear performing warm up exercises in a supermarket. He then proceeds to jog on the mechanical conveyor belt of a till as the cashier watches him, making no intervention. This deliberately odd scene is a reflection on fast paced urban existence, turning the conveyor belt, a symbol of consumer convenience, into an obstacle course. It invites us to consider how, despite the ways in which technology makes our everyday lives easier, we continue to rush as if it were a race. 

The video was originally conceived and performed in a supermarket in the Swiss countryside, where the artist was in-residence at the time. Chihying recounts how easy it was to film there, whereas it would have been almost impossible to produce the work in a city supermarket, among the urban crowds rushing between the aisles.

He’s offered unique solutions to modern problems

The Toyota is a life-sized inflatable replica of Chihying’s fathers’ Toyota Corolla E100. Imported from Japan in the 1980s, the Corolla became a bestselling car model in Taiwan, serving both as a symbol of family adventure but also a source of stress in congested urban metropolises. As a creative solution to the limited parking space in Taipei, Chihying created this model which could shapeshift to occupy a spot on the street while being easy to store away in the boot when it was not needed. 

A Life of Navigation features the original inflatable model accompanied by six photographs of the artists’ father deploying it on the streets of Taipei as an unusual way of asserting ownership of a parking spot. Though humorous in tone, the work raises important questions about accessibility to public spaces in the city.

He wants us to question how we view the world

Chihying is interested in unpacking the ideologies that contribute to our understanding of images and the world at large. The Annotation (2025-26) is a five channel video-installation investigating the training of artificial intelligence for the development of self-driving cars. Set within an intelligent car cockpit, the work brings together conversations with researchers, taxi drivers and transnational data annotators – all of whom are tasked with manually labeling endless images to train machine vision. 

Most of these annotators are based in Africa across Kenya, Nigeria and Ghana, raising questions about the cost and ethics of automation. Is this reflective of a shift in the nature of power beyond the western world, or merely a contemporary form of 18th century European colonialism, with digital metrics serving as the tool of control rather than physical violence?

His recent work has scrutinised the tension between leisure and labour

Two of Chihying’s newest video installations, The Annotation (2025-26) and The Gamer (2026) – both of which premiere in A Life of Navigation – attempt to uncover unseen forms of labour embedded within new technologies. The latter follows four Nigerian gamers who are employed as ‘boosters’ in difficult video gaming tasks, leveling up ranks and competing on behalf of overseas clients. Through combining interviews with play and enactment, the work evokes Julian Kücklich’s concept of ‘playbour’: playful labour and laborious play.

By juxtaposing these elements Chihying reveals the hidden digital economies and physical toll taking place behind the screen, raising questions about work, leisure and play in the digital age. He asks who is really playing, who is working and who benefits when leisure becomes a service? But rather than impose an authoritative view on the ethics of these new forms of labour, the artist presents varied perspectives for you to unpack and consider.

Collaboration and first-hand research are key to his creative process

Chihying’s projects develop over long periods of time, and are often presented in multiple iterations. His creative process usually begins with a question, an encounter or a historical connection that he wants to investigate more deeply. This is followed by extensive archival and first-person research which involves conversations with people from different backgrounds as well as working collaboratively with filmmakers, musicians, sound artists, and craftspeople. 

While he is aware of the ways new technologies have impacted the process of research and production of art works, Chihying believes that human interaction and field research remain an irreplaceable part of his process. Working in this way, taking varied experiences and perspectives into account, often opens up unexpected directions for his projects.