The Taiwanese artist (b. 1966) often endows his kinetic sculptures with personal references that carry wider cultural implications. This show’s highlight, River of Childhood (1999), is a sprawling floor installation that features myriad small white ceramic boats bobbing on rods above electrical motors and their snaking cords. The boats recall paper versions that the young Shyu often made from his frustrating math homework and set dreamily on a nearby stream. The high modernist imperative to expose one’s artistic means is thus deftly combined with an Eastern sense of slow, all-encompassing time in which past and future are ultimately one.
