Mimian Hsu

Feliz. Installation of 35 piles of printed paper, 2012. Costa Rica, el País más Feliz del Mundo / La Suiza Centroamericana, MADC, San José, Costa Rica, 2012. Soul Mining, ASU Museum, Arizona, USA, 2017. Soul Mining, Vincent Price Museum, Los Angeles, USA, 2018.

This installation piece of paper towers writes the word Feliz (Happy). The technique consists in a font that I have developed to create works of art which uses the letter size paper as a unit to compose letters that then write words. These sheets of paper are arranged as piles and each contain information, data or documents that are relevant to the word they spell. The paper is for the public to take and eventually the installation disappears.

In this case the piece writes the word Feliz (Happy), and the paper contains the names of advertising campaigns launched by the Costa Rican and Chinese governments. One half of the sheets say: The Gift of Happiness which is the name of the million dollar campaign to promote Costa Rica as a tourist destination aimed at the US and European public by ICT (Costa Rican Tourism Institute which is a public entity) using our first place ranking as the happiest country in the world according to the Happy Planet index (2009, 2012). The other half has the slogan of the new campaign designed by the Chinese government that reads: Happy Guangdong, to lift the spirits of the population which has been under intense international scrutiny due to the suicide rate by factory workers like FoxConn. These two campaigns happen parallel to very different realities in each country, where the position of the governments toward the real solutions to the problems of unhappiness or insatisfaction of its people are far from happening. In moments where the chief of the Guangdong communist party Wang Yang has officially stated: “We must erradicate the wrong concept that happiness is a benevolent gift from the party and the government.”, and at the same time the Costa Rican people show a record low pessimism towards its government’s job, these campaigns and its titles offer a simplistic and unreal image of its countries.