Artist
TAO HUI
Tao Hui was born in Chongqing in 1987 and currently lives and works in Beijing. He graduated from the Oil Painting Department of Sichuan Fine Arts Institute in 2010. Tao is interested in the narrative structure of film, television and theatre. Through abstraction of visual material from pop culture, Tao develops his own visual style and narrative perspective, using metaphors to reflect the socio-cultural psychology and aesthetic need of the contemporary society. His solo exhibitions include: Rhythm and Senses, Edouard Malingue Gallery, Hong Kong, 2019; Tao Hui: Not at All, OCAT, Xi’an, 2017; New Directions: Tao Hui, UCCA, Beijing, 2015; 1 Character and 7 Materials, Aike Gallery, Shanghai, 2015. Group exhibitions include: Christoph Keller, Hito Steyerl, Tao Hui, Esther Schipper, Berlin, 2019; Beyond Bliss, Bangkok Art Biennale, Bangkok, 2018; 2018 Asia Project: How Little You Know About Me, The National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Korea, 2018; “Hugo Boss Asia Art”, Rockbund Museum, Shanghai, 2017.
Public Collections M+ Museum, Hong Kong Kadist Art Foundation, San Francisco The Foundation Louis Vuitton, Paris K11 Art Foundation, Hong Kong New Century Art Foundation, Beijing Sunpride Foundation, Taipei National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Seoul |
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Selected Works / Exhibitions
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TAO HUI The Tangible Ones, 2018 (installation views and on-site video preview) Digital fan projection and sound 10’35” Edition of 3+1AP Tao Hui spent his childhood on the foggy top of a mountain in Chongqing, where the Yangtze River could not be seen. With limited accessibility to the internet and information in the outside world, the young Tao Hui loved the stories that older women in the village used to tell, gossips and mystery tales that oral retellings made into fantastical, riveting stories. Mass cultural productions – television series, films, reality shows – have also put a great influence on the artist’s practice since he was young. This experience expands Tao’s visual properties and gives him liberty to observe, to re-associate, and to reinvent plots and anecdotes that blink into his mind. In The Tangible Ones, Tao Hui created a fictional narrative in which two young women, a French and a Chinese, try to deliver their thoughts of someone by telling their stories alone to the open air. A melody playing along with the singing and storytelling throughout the video portrays the characters and their time in the vivid descriptions of day-to-day experiences and the soliloquy of wondering. Tao probes the relationship between the media landscape and the social body, and reflects on the fraught ethics of belonging in a hyper-mediatized reality. The random association between the subjective audio and the visual fragments creates a narrative structure that is not only postmodern, but also an open-ended demonstration of Tao’s subversive thinking in the linear narrative of video art. |
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