Image: Hayward Gallery, London
Taiwanese multimedia artist Musquiqui Chihying is the subject of A Life of Navigation, a free exhibition in the HENI Project Space at London's Hayward Gallery, open from 3 to 18 October 2026. According to the Southbank Centre, it is the artist's first solo exhibition in a UK public institution.
The presentation brings together four works made over more than a decade, showing how Chihying's interest in technology and everyday life has moved from personal, performative gestures towards research into the labour behind digital systems.
The earliest piece, The Jog (2014), is a two-channel video in which the artist, in sportswear, warms up inside a supermarket before running on the conveyor belt of a checkout. The Southbank Centre presents the work as a comment on how people keep hurrying even as technology is meant to make daily life easier.
The Toyota (2015) takes a family problem as its starting point. Chihying made a full-size inflatable copy of his father's Toyota Corolla E100 as a response to the shortage of parking in Taipei: it could be inflated to hold a space on the street and folded into the boot when not needed. Six photographs show his father using it on the city's streets.
Two recent works turn to artificial intelligence and online work. The Annotation (2025–26), a five-channel video installation, looks at how AI for self-driving cars is developed. It draws on conversations with researchers, taxi drivers and data annotators, the workers who label images used to train machine vision; most of those featured are based in Kenya, Nigeria and Ghana. According to the Southbank Centre, the work raises ethical questions about the real cost of automation.
The Gamer (2026) follows four Nigerian gamers hired as "boosters", who take on difficult tasks in video games and climb rankings on behalf of clients abroad. The installation uses the idea of "playbour", the blurred line between play and paid work, to examine leisure in the digital economy.
Collaboration and field research are central to Chihying's practice. He works with filmmakers, musicians, sound artists and craftspeople, and his projects typically begin with a question or an encounter, followed by archival research and interviews with people from different backgrounds. The artist has described creativity less as a matter of producing striking images than as a way of building relationships, challenging accepted narratives and looking beneath the surface of what an image shows.
