At the Hayward Gallery in London, Musquiqui Chihying: A Life of Navigation (Aug 25Oct 18, 2026) maps a decade of the artists moving-image inquiries with a concise, intentionally curated mini-retrospective. Drawn from works spanning 2014 to the present, the presentation threads curiosity and humor through shifting social moods, then pivots toward urgent, research-driven conversations.
Early frictions, playfully staged
The exhibition opens with The Jog (2014), in which Musquiqui Chihying turns a German supermarket checkout into a makeshift treadmill. A cashier looks on as the artist, in little blue shorts, ambles in placea wry enactment of the spiritual alienation of the daily grind and the mundane conveniences that keep us moving without necessarily going anywhere.
That nimble, satirical touch carries into The Toyota (2015). A row of six framed photographs shows the artists father packing up an inflatable plastic car used to hold his parking spot. The device speaks to ever-diminishing access to public space and resources in dense cities like Taipei. It also summons a generational image: the Toyota Corolla as a symbol of aspirational prosperity in the Taipei of Chihyings youth, contrasted here with an inflatable stand-in parked inside the gallery.
Inquiry in the age of automation
The recent works turn inquisitive, leaning on interviews to parse fast-changing technologies and their cross-continental consequences. The Annotation (2025) returns to carsnow automatedand seats its audience in sleek leather drivers chairs that rumble as if idling on their own. On screen, AI scholars, journalists, and data workers weigh who benefits from autonomous driving, whose labor is exploited, and whose biases and instincts shape these systems. The perspectives are notably varied: a Taipei taxi driver enthuses about lavender-scented cabs free from dangerous or disgusting human drivers while acknowledging the threat to her own job; elsewhere, experts credit womens contributions to the field and call out the exploitation of data annotators in Africa.
Chihying narrows in on such global entanglements in The Gamer (2026), following young people in Nigeria who make a living battling through games like Call of Duty, grinding for high ranks and rare items on behalf of paying clients, mostly in China and Japan. Echoing The Annotation, the film surfaces a workforce of highly educated, underpaid laborers; between interviews, they move through a building wielding sawed-off drainpipes and splintered 2x4s, LARPing the first-person shooters that fund their days. The choreography rhymes with that earlier supermarket treadmill, but the lens now fixes on the Afro-Asian ties forged by emerging industries such as AI.
Across its tight selection, A Life of Navigation charts a clear arc: from tongue-in-cheek scenes of everyday strain to probing dialogues about automation, data, and labor. The decades gulf is palpableand precisely what the show sets out to reveal.
