‘injector after Null’ takes as a starting point the artwork sandbox, presented as part of Hsien-Yu CHENG’s 2017 solo exhibition ‘injector before Null’. By intercepting and redirecting radio signals from the audience’s mobile devices provided by local carriers, sandbox sought to make use of the empty exhibition space to obtain a temporary phone number by which specially elaborated SMS messages were transmitted in order to guide the audience to explore several works apparently absent from the site. Most of the text messages concerned “things that seem to exist even if the viewer cannot verify their existence from beginning to end”.

This idea of “seemingly existing things” becomes an inspiration for the current exhibition’s conceptual evolution. Things come into existence primarily by means of human discovery, verification, definition and categorization. Imagination allows us to see through and put into practice what is presumably taken for illusion and apply it to attain a certain level of technology, economy and culture. This exhibition attempts to provoke a discussion on human recognition of veracity and eternity. In the meanwhile, as the most influential creature over Mother Nature, shall we be more wary or vigilant to approve and accept every human creation nowadays? Or shall we instead just let these phenomena be carried away driftlessly by the tide of time and natural surroundings, by the endless cycle of death and rebirth?

As a revision of the work presented in CHENG’s 2020 solo exhibition ‘Assimilator’, discharged what you charged: room edition is designed to reinforce the viewer’s awareness around the perceptual experience of time and space. In the other installations, the objects distributed in the space perform and/or react according to the viewer’s behavior, operating, therefore, as triggering and echo mechanisms.  This brings to the fore the different variations of the surrounding substances often overlooked by humans as well as the observation and discovery of the predetermined interrelationships between events, objects and phenomena. It is in this sense that ‘injector after Null’ invokes the concepts and preoccupations initiated in the previous solo exhibition ‘injector before Null’.