“Made in Taiwan” explores how iPhones consume the world – Chicago Reader Feedzy

 Installation view, “Made in Taiwan,” Chinese American Museum of Chicago, 2023. Credit: Courtesy the artists

The fact that I wrote this review on a MacBook and you are probably reading it on an iPhone only makes this exhibition more pertinent and powerful.

“Made in Taiwan” is a research-based exhibition thoughtfully produced by Taiwanese-Chinese-American artist Cathy Hsiao and Cuban artist Nestor Sir? for the Chinese American Museum of Chicago. By connecting important geopolitical nodes of the global tech network, the exhibition offers a multifaceted technological reimagination that responds to the unsettling technocratic reality we live in today.

The exhibition brings transnational connectivity to the forefront of our attention. Let’s begin with the aesthetic. One of the most visually discernible elements that runs through the show is the blue-and-white motif, or “qinghua,” which literally means “blue flower” in Chinese. This motif fills the monumental vinyl exhibition title that takes over the exterior wall of the museum; it recurs as decorations on the one-to-one-scale ceramic iPhone models, from iPhone 6 to iPhone 14, which are displayed inside the gallery and in a tongue-in-cheek Apple-store manner: lined up neatly on a workbench.

Absurd Accessories, a series of 3D-printed prototypes, designed by AI, depict imaginary Apple accessories of no discernible use. Credit: Courtesy the artists

Although “qinghua”–best known through Chinese porcelain–may be perceived as imbued with Chinese or East Asian identity, it is, in fact, as historian James Millward nicely puts it, a “case of continental cross-fertilization.” The cobalt ore that give it its expensive blue were mined in Persia; the earliest examples of applying this intense color in ceramics were found in ancient Egyptian artifacts and Islamic wares dating back to the ninth century–centuries before the bloom of blue-and-white pottery in China. This is just one of the many early examples of how transnational trade contributes to the development of technology, for better or for worse.

Hsiao and Sir? have taken “qinghua” a digital step further: all the blue-and-white motifs in this show were spawned by various AI software developed by international companies (Midjourney and Lexica, headquartered in San Francisco; and Photoleap, owned by Lightricks, based in Jerusalem). The patterns are visually convincing at a glimpse but unmistakably bizarre upon scrutiny. On every ceramic iPhone, there is an outstanding red Chinese seal that reads “Made in Taiwan,” like a dry cry that declares nonexistent ownership. What exactly is made in Taiwan?

The answer to this question lies in another group of works, A-Series, installed on the gallery’s west wall. Five laser-engraved aluminum boards correspond to the five ceramic iPhones, detailing Apple’s five different system-on-chip (SoC) processors, from A8 to A16. Each board has a patent-like technical drawing of the model and is framed by a 3D-printed motherboard, with the chip reproduced in “qinghua” porcelain, signaling that the chip is made in Taiwan. Although the way the texts and infographics are lumped together serves as more of an aesthetic purpose (for example, news headlines seem to correspond to the year of the model, but the graphs on the iPhone’s supply chain and assembly line are not chip-specific), they together provide an astonishing snapshot of the most important players of Apple’s sprawling global manufacturing footprint.

Ars Technica reported that in 2022 “all of Apple’s chips have been manufactured at [Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company] for most of the last decade.” For TSMC, the world’s largest dedicated semiconductor foundry headquartered in Taiwan, which also has significant footprints in mainland China and will soon open major plants in Arizona, Apple is also one of its biggest customers. There’s nothing wrong, for now, with saying that the chips are made in Taiwan, except that Beijing does not like it. What Hsiao and Sir? attempt to do in this exhibition is show us how foreign affairs complicate transnational trades and how the nuanced language in the Country of Origin Labeling (COOL) is politicized by territorial disputes. In 2022, after then U.S. House speaker Nancy Pelosi’s visit to Taiwan, Apple signaled its island suppliers to label their parts as made in “Chinese Taipei” or “Taiwan, China”–a necessary procedure to avoid the increasingly strict Chinese custom inspections.

The facade of the museum. Credit: Courtesy the artists

This is, again, one intermediary node, out of a myriad, in the production chain that we as end consumers of Apple products don’t get to witness. The vast majority of iPhones were previously labeled as “Designed by Apple in California. Assembled in China.” One of the major assemblers is Foxconn, another Taiwanese company that gave birth to the dystopic and immense “iPhone City” in Zhengzhou, China, notorious for its labor abuse and an exodus of workers due to a badly managed COVID-19 outbreak just last year. If we take into consideration the “origins” of other iPhone parts such as the display (Korea) and flash memory (Japan), or if we delve deeper into the material histories from mining to smelting, the device on which you are probably reading my text right now is part of a horrifying chorus that numerous individuals around the globe have participated in.

The U.S., Taiwan, and mainland China, marked by their frenetic participation in the worldwide capitalist game, are at one end of the spectrum of tech production; Cuba, tethered by its communist past and economic stagnation, occupies a space at the other end. Havana-based artist Sir?, who has emerged from the digital culture of his native land and built his practice around the investigation into the distribution of merchandise and the power structure therein, draws our attention to the underground hacking culture omnipresent in the country. A three-hour video (part of his ongoing project, CubaCreativa), ironically displayed on an iPhone pinned to the wall, is a compilation of a series of found or artist-recorded videos on hacking and repairing Apple devices. According to the artists, there are no Apple stores in Cuba to date, although AI software wants to convince us otherwise (if you input a query to Photoleap, the AI generator will give you a glass Apple building in a Cuban environment). And, despite the prolonged U.S. trade embargo against Cuba, which has depressed the country’s economic condition, technical creativity thrives as a response to the scarcity in almost everything.

This kind of necessary creativity manifests in Absurd Accessories, a series of 3D-printed prototypes, designed by AI and produced using filament from plastic waste processed by open-source recycling machines. They depict imaginary Apple accessories of no discernible use. Apart from its biting sarcasm on companies that push out more useless products to stay afloat, it hits a darker truth: Extractive capitalism worsens the human condition by sucking the liveliness out of the individual and spitting it out as excessive waste. What video artist Sherrie Rabinowitz said in 1984–that “artists need to create on the same scale that society has the capacity to destroy”–still holds true, though her vision hasn’t yet been achieved.

“Made in Taiwan”Through 8/27: Wed and Fri 9:30 AM-5 PM, Sat-Sun 10 AM-5 PM, Chinese American Museum of Chicago, 238 West 23rd St., ccamuseum.org, suggested admission: adults $8, students/seniors $5, free for members