Su Yu Hsin uses the blast furnace control room as the anchor point for her multidimensional video work. In Blast Furnace No. 2, the artist combines spectacular satellite images with archive material and interview excerpts to explore the themes of steel production, globalisation and the cosmic origins of iron from a kaleidoscopic perspective, drawing on geological, socio-historical and ecological perspectives.

In 1989, shortly before the closure of the Henrichshütte, blast furnace 2 was purchased by a Chinese steelworks, transported away and rebuilt in Hunan. It operated there for another 15 years until it was replaced by a larger furnace. In Hattingen, only an empty base, the “Ofensau”, bears witness to the former centre of the Henrichshütte. Blast Furnace No. 2 follows the paths of globalisation from Hattingen via Hunan – and finally into space: a look at the mineral collection of the Henrichshütte extends the temporal scale of the history of “HO II” to include geological time. There, an iron-bearing meteorite points to the cosmic origin of the metal: iron occurs everywhere in the universe and was already present in cosmic dust when the Earth was formed. Su Yu Hsin also takes up this deep-time perspective narratively to shed light on raw material extraction and processing.

Su Yu Hsin (born 1989, Taichung) is an artist and filmmaker. She approaches ecology in its close relationship to technology. In her essayistic film and video installation works, she reflects on technology, ecology, and the critical infrastructures that connect the human and the non-human.
Her works have been exhibited at the Museum of Contemporary Art Busan, Taipei Biennale, ZKM Karlsruhe, Kyoto Art Centre, Haus der Kulturen der Welt Berlin, among others. She was a finalist at the 8th Huayu Youth Award (2020) and LOOP Barcelona Discover (2018).