The artist’s first institutional solo show in Hong Kong navigates the constantly changing Chinese landscape, both physical and social
Tao Hui’s first institutional solo show in Hong Kong comprises a fairly small selection of the artist’s most recent multimedia works. Relying heavily on video and constructed architectural spaces, these rather cold, standalone, large-scale compositions explore various kinds of loneliness and displacement within the framework of life in China: from the isolation experienced by those who inhabit alienating cities, to the hardship faced by migrant workers as well as the millions of people who make an income as live streamers. To call these works sad beyond words would be an understatement.
We enter the show through a threshold: an installation called Money Grab Hand (2024) consisting of hanging strings to which are attached chicken feet made from coloured glass. Functioning as a curtain, it is a rather chilling introduction, like a chain of chopped-off hands. Chicken feet are often eaten in China (to start with, consider boiling them in water with ginger and star anise, for up to two hours, before braising them), but in some regions they are also understood as a symbol of good luck or as a divination tool. Following this gateway of sorts, we are faced with wooden forms that have been slotted together on the floor and mimic undulating hills, if such an environment was geometric and sharp-angled. A ceramic toilet has been placed on top of one mound, breaking under the pressure of a stone snake coiled around it – titled, rather playfully, Cuddle (2021). The allusion to pressure, as well as longed-for relief, can be deciphered through this scatological reference.
Tao’s video and multimedia works explore feelings of loss, disconnection and desire, navigating the constantly changing Chinese landscape, both physical and social. Hardworking (2023–24), a video that plays on a curved vertical screen, offers an insight into the life of a live streamer, who positions herself in front of her phone to sing to faraway followers. Jostling for space among countless other live streamers, she leads an unglamourous, lonely life. Behind the curved screen in the gallery is a wooden sculpture of a melting man who props up the unit with his weary shoulders. The centrepiece of the exhibition, Chilling Terror Sweeps the North (2024), is a two-channel video installation housed within a plexiglass structure. In the 26-minute video, two lovers, one from the northwest and one from the south, try to navigate a gap of regional and social disparities between them that seems impossible to breach. Their differences are represented by the settings in which we see them: the lush humidity of the south of China, where the guy in the story comes from, or the harsh, inhospitable dryness of the Hexi Corridor in the western province of Gansu, the family home of the young woman. The couple barely communicate, verbally at least, and when they do, they are hindered by their very different accents and dialects. Their strong attachment to each other is instead revealed through moments of physical and emotional tension – both lovers look desperate and anguished, physically unable to stand or to speak. During this heartbreaking film, both protagonists wear strange accessories that have been planted right into their skull, adding a level of palpable physical pain to their psychological despair (a sickle traverses the woman’s temples, and a small wooden stool is stuck to the man’s forehead, together referencing xue shehuo, or ‘blood shehuo’, a type of theatrical performance still common in the Chinese countryside in the north that belongs to the horror genre, a nod to some of the most popular gory ghost stories in Chinese literature). The LED screen is housed inside a plexiglass structure that, from the outside, could recall a Chinese temple, while from the inside it might recall a Chinese mosque – again, Tao plays on cultural difference, citing Islamic presence in the western regions of the country and the more predominant Chinese folk religion in the south. A second long and narrow vertical screen next to the main one shows a musician, dressed in a traditional silk robe, playing a sanxian, a long-necked southern Chinese lute with three strings. The solo musical accompaniment furthers the sense of there being no possible resolution to the lover’s anguish – a constant of Tao’s works, especially in this show, in which problems are exposed without there being any visible, or possible, resolution.
In this show, class divides, alienation and an ever more fragile connection to one’s roots are all handled rather darkly, holding up a very bleak mirror of Chinese society. As if after the go-go years of extraordinary economic growth, what remains most tangible is the enormous sacrifices made by the working class and by those who seemed to have reached a more comfortable level of economic stability; and the deep feeling of loneliness and sadness these have created.
In the Land Beyond Living at Tai Kwun Contemporary, Hong Kong, through 2 February
From the Winter 2024 issue of ArtReview Asia – get your copy.
