Jerry Hsu: “Dystopia Is More Present Than Ever”

The world feels distinctly pre-dystopian proper now. Maybe that creeping feeling has infiltrated my notion, as a result of as I look by way of Jerry Hsu’s new picture guide How About Never, I see harbingers of doom amid the great thing about his footage – acrid-looking smoke billowing right into a street; a lone chook (“one for sorrow”) perched on a chainlink fence, silhouetted by an impressive sundown; the bonnet of a burnt-out automobile which seems to be melting onto the pavement; a teddybear, slumped and deserted on a roadside. But Hsu disagrees. “I would say the atmosphere of the book is more romantic and compassionate,” he says. “But that’s just me. I could be really wrong about that.”

How About Never brings collectively pictures shot by Hsu in Los Angeles since 2011. With an eye fixed for the humour, tragedy and great thing about the world because it unfolds round him, this blizzard of images creates a nuanced portrait of town’s avenue life in a sequence of fragments – its uncanny coincidences and its random injustices in addition to its chic moments. While he insists he’s not deliberately invoking the underlying horror of the present political second, he does acknowledge the pervading sense of one thing apocalyptic brewing. “Dystopia is more present than ever, it is just not evenly distributed,” he tells AnOther. “I live in America which maintains this fantasy of superiority, but right below that facade is a very fraught world. I’m not trying to have a dialogue about that though. I’m just using what’s happening in my environment to describe my inner world. Anything construed as dystopian may just be a default in what I am attracted to.”

Los Angeles itself – a metropolis on a fault line – is its personal type of uncanny development, equal measures utopian and dystopian. But Hsu didn’t need to invoke the ready-made cultural associations LA holds, typically cropping out palm bushes or figuring out options that anchored the images an excessive amount of in a caricature of town. “There is this notion that LA is very glamorous. And maybe sometimes it is, but I was very uninterested in that. It might have pushed me to look in the other direction,” he explains. “This place is obviously a character in the book but I rarely, if ever, made reference to it consciously.”

As a skateboarder, Hsu has a unique technique of exploring the streets and a barely altered relationship with the city panorama than most. In a metropolis of vehicles, skate boarders are a lot nearer to the bottom, and way more linked with the materiality of the streets – the steps, railings and surfaces. Also, their views of town aren’t mediated by gazing out by way of a windscreen. “I guess as skateboarders we are so deeply immersed and dependent on our environment that we have no choice but to learn its geography and architecture. The need for something new never seems to go away so we search and search,” he says. “A side effect is this place actually keeps surprising me with what it has to offer.” 

What Hsu has primarily discovered about LA since he moved to town aged 29 from his residence city of San Jose, is that it’s unknowable. “I know I will never really know this city nor do I need to. It’s not even really a city – more of a vast region of regions. I am just endlessly curious about this place. It feels like I’ve barely scratched the surface, but I have no claim to it and certainly have no authority to talk that much about it. I basically just go about my business and look around when I can.”

The narratives Hsu hopes emerge from the guide are of “isolation, contradiction, being in love, heartbreak and hope”. But, other than partaking with these components and describing the lifetime of town as he experiences it from his skateboarder’s-eye-view, How About Never can also be impregnated with a really private autobiographical story. The footage span the length of his relationship along with his now-ex-wife, from once they moved to LA once they first began courting by way of to their eventual divorce. “All the work in the book was made while we were falling in love to falling out of it,” he says. While the photographs aren’t explicitly tracing the trajectory of this love story, it’s a robust aspect in Hsu’s life which was working concurrently with its manufacturing. “In the final year of making this work my marriage ended. The emotions, confusion and grief of that experience were happening in real time as I completed the edit,” he remembers. “But the book is not about a divorce, it reflects an entire relationship – one that was successful and worth having.”

Finally, maybe nonetheless with dystopia on my thoughts, I recommend lots of the footage depict moments when one thing is about to occur (a leaping cat is about to land, a lightbulb in a microwave is about to blow up). Or one thing has simply occurred (a constructing has caught hearth, a automobile has overturned) however it isn’t resolved. There’s a way of anticipation and foreboding. “A theme in this work is transformation and what must be endured to achieve it,” he says. “Many of the more chaotic or energised imagery are proxies for emotional pain and contradiction. I have no other way to describe it.” I’m wondering if the photographs are functioning for us each as a Rorschach check would possibly. Hsu ponders. “Maybe I’m having a crisis?”