Image: Museum of Contemporary Art Cleveland
The Museum of Contemporary Art Cleveland will present ‘Tishan Hsu: permeable surface’, a career-spanning exhibition examining the artist’s long-running investigation of the relationship between the human body and technology. The exhibition opens on August 28, 2026, and remains on view through March 7, 2027, at moCa Cleveland in Cleveland, Ohio.
Organized around Hsu’s sustained engagement with perception, embodiment and technological systems, the exhibition brings together works made across more than four decades. His visual language combines digital imagery, industrial materials, biomorphic forms and video, producing objects and environments that the museum describes as uncanny. The presentation addresses how screens and other systems increasingly mediate people’s experience of the world, as well as the tactile and psychological effects of that mediation.
The exhibition includes Hsu’s first and most recent video works, ‘Folds of Oil’ from 2005 and ‘emergent mesh’ from 2025. The pairing places an early work alongside a recent real-time video, allowing the exhibition to track the continuity of Hsu’s concerns while showing how his treatment of technology has developed over time. ‘emergent mesh’ is identified by the museum as a 2025 still-based real-time video work, with the presentation credited to Lisson Gallery.
Born in Boston in 1951, Hsu lives and works in New York. His practice bridges classical fine-art training and architectural design, linking Renaissance technique with what the museum calls futuristic sensibilities. He studied architecture and environmental design at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he received a bachelor’s degree in 1973 and a Master of Architecture in 1975. He also studied film at Harvard University’s Carpenter Center and has taught at Sarah Lawrence College, Pratt Institute and Harvard University.
Hsu’s recent solo exhibitions include presentations at MAMCO in Geneva in 2024, Secession in Vienna from 2023 to 2024, and SculptureCenter in New York in 2020; the SculptureCenter exhibition later traveled to the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles in 2021. His work has also appeared in the 2022 Venice Biennale exhibition ‘The Milk of Dreams’, the 2022 Carnegie International and the 2021 Gwangju Biennale. It is held in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, Centre Pompidou in Paris, Tate Modern in London and M+ in Hong Kong, among other institutions.
‘Tishan Hsu: permeable surface’ will be on view at the Museum of Contemporary Art Cleveland, 11400 Euclid Avenue, Cleveland, from August 28, 2026, through March 7, 2027.
