ONCE IN A WHILE: On Substitutions, Displacement and Illegible Bodies

Abstract

ONCE IN A WHILE is the master's degree graduation project of Ginko Hsu, which consists of a written thesis component and an artistic exhibition component. This thesis explores how fragmented memory, inherited grief, and cultural displacement shape the perception and construction of the body, through the concept of the ersatz body—a substitute marked by absence, rupture, and illegibility. Moving through feminist, postcolonial, and hauntological frameworks, the written component weaves personal narrative, myth, fiction, iconography, and diasporic thinking to ask how alternative systems of knowledge may emerge from what is lost, obscured, or unspoken. The artistic component has taken place at Tasku Galleria, as a part of Kuvan Kevät Master’s Degree Show, from May 17th to June 15th in 2025. It presents a series of multimedia installations, combining ceramic sculpture, hand-tufted textile, glass, photography print, projection, and participatory ritual. For me, these works evoke memories that are personal yet shared, incomplete yet intimate, distant yet felt, offering forms of soft resistance. Together, the thesis proposes a way of thinking through disjunction: not toward fixed identity or coherence, but toward meaning that is held in fragments, tenderness, and embodied process.