Got a pesky neighbour who keeps pinching your parking spot? Taiwanese artist Musquiqui Chihying’s father knew the feeling. In car-clogged Taipei, he came up with an ingenious solution: an inflatable decoy of his Toyota Corolla E100. Whenever he drove off in the morning, he’d leave the blow-up Corolla in its place. When he returned later from work, he’d deflate the decoy, roll it up, stow it in the boot and reclaim his space.
He might have to fight for his spot for the next six weeks, though, as his trusty decoy is currently parked at the Hayward Gallery as part of his son’s exhibition, A Life of Navigation. It’s one of four works exploring the strange and ingenious ways we navigate our busy, high-stress urban lives. Working across installation, video, photography and sculptural objects, and often incorporating performance, Chihying approaches those pressures with a sense of humour.
Another (literal) aisle Chihying explores in this urban obstacle course is the supermarket. ‘The Jog’ (2014), a two-channel video, sees Chihying don his running gear and jog against the checkout conveyor belt as if it were a treadmill, while an unimpressed cashier looks on. It’s an entertaining take on the endless cycles of consumerism and the repetitive grind of city life. On a more immediate level, all the stretching and athleisure makes it a silent, considerably less sexed-up version of Eric Prydz’s ‘Call on Me’ music video.
It’s an entertaining take on the repetitive grind of city life
There’s some new stuff here too. Block out the shrieks of kids on their last week of the summer holidays and stick on the headphones for ‘The Gamer’(2026), a reel of interviews with Nigerian gamers paid by overseas clients – many in China and Japan, we learn – to play on their behalf. To the Boomers out there, this might require some explanation: there’s a whole economy out there where being very good at video games can make you more money than a suit-and-tie nine-till-five. ‘So why not?’ asks one gamer. ‘It makes [life] manageable because the economy keeps on getting worse and worse’. For Chihying, these unlikely connections between gamers in Nigeria and clients thousands of miles away offer a way of looking at how power, money and labour move around an increasingly transactional world.
Across the four works, Chihying’s humour keeps some pretty knotty ideas about labour, consumerism and technology from getting bogged down in theory. However, it is a small show. Some would say too small. But luckily you’re already at the Hayward Gallery, and it runs alongside Anish Kapoor’s exhibition next door. Stop by once you’ve taken a few photographs of Kapoor’s jacked-up, crimson-PVC Babybel of a sculpture; this one’s free.
