Tao Hui: In the Land Beyond Living

EVENT DESCRIPTION

Tai Kwun Contemporary is proud to present Tao Hui’s first institutional solo exhibition in Hong Kong, In the Land Beyond Living. Through mediums including painting, sculpture, video, sound, installation, and set design, the artist Tao Hui (b. 1987, Chongqing) constructs an absurdist, surreal landscape. Viewers are invited to reconsider the lives and spiritual states of ordinary folk as they navigate the ebb and flow of social development in China — from north to south, inland to coast,  urban to rural, and industrial to natural.

In the Land Beyond Living features Tao Hui’s artistic exploration of various individual struggles and hardships. The artist spotlights stories often overlooked, such as those of ethnic minorities inhabiting the Hexi Corridor in the western province of Gansu, migrant workers eking out survival in rapidly developing cities, and new elites pursuing spiritual fulfilment. Probing our relentless search for a better life, Tao Hui weaves together tales of harsh conditions, migration waves, and regional disparities, forging surreal imagery to offer up new perspectives with which to understand the complexities of the contemporary present.

The exhibition features several new works from Tao Hui, specially commissioned by Tai Kwun. Upon entering the gallery, visitors are greeted by a striking display of hyper-realistic, yet vibrantly coloured glass chicken feet—framing the space as a threshold. This eerily enchanting work, titled Money Grab Hand, guides viewers into an alternate realm “beyond living”. Within the space, the key piece—a multi-dimensional audio-visual installation titled Chilling Terror Sweeps the North—revolves around a love story replete with innuendoes, which interpret and reflect contemporary social disparities and divisions, along with the choices, compromises, confrontations, or escapes they entail. Flowing in a stream-of-consciousness manner, the work connects different timelines and spaces, blending reality with dreams, and leaving space for poetic and imaginative introspection.

In the Land Beyond Living constructs a distinctively dreamlike, otherworldly scene around this key work, Chilling Terror Sweeps the North. From the ceiling down, the entire exhibition space is cast in a bluish hue, inviting viewers to step over undulating “hills” that make up “the land beyond living” and enter a pavilion with the exterior of a Chinese temple and an interior featuring an Islamic-styled arched dome. Inside, seated on glossy, marble-patterned vinyl flooring, the audience watches the film on a bright LED screen while a holographic storyteller offers remarks on the engrossing, unfolding tale of love and conflict while performing folk music from northern China. Layered sounds, visuals, lights, and tactile surfaces prompt viewers to engage with the work on a multi-sensorial level.

Debuting in Asia for the first time, Tao Hui’s latest piece Hardworking (2023) features a specially commissioned wooden sculpture resembling a melting human shape; supported on its back is a custom-designed slumped screen standing at almost three metres tall. Following his 2019 work Pulsating Atom, this piece once again adopts the vertical format of a mobile phone screen, depicting a livestream host on an e-commerce platform. She tirelessly performs, hawking her products day and night, exploited to the point of being unable to tolerate the relentless demands of work and life. In this reflection on the increasingly dominant role of social media and mobile screen culture, Tao Hui asks viewers to investigate the codependent relationships between the screen and reality, livelihood and hardship, and the self and imagery in an increasingly digitised and isolated world.

Among the newly commissioned sculptures, Cuddle, which stands atop the undulating hills, marks Tao Hui’s first experimentation with stone and ceramic materials. A petrified serpent coils tightly around a ceramic toilet, crushing it to the point of near rupture. The tension in the piece, although absurdist on the surface, feels oddly familiar. The sense of suffocating pressure, irrational yet unsettling, is precisely the atmosphere In the Land Beyond Living aims to evoke: it visualises the quasi-absurd pressures of everyday life—hard both to describe and to release—in the hope of finding resonance with the audience and providing a sense of relief.

Apart from the works inside the gallery space, the exhibition also features a new set of film stills that expand on the piece Chilling Terror Sweeps the North. Specially commissioned and designed by Tao Hui for the 44 and 55 Squared projects, they are currently displayed on the billboards at Tai Kwun’s Parade Ground.

ABOUT THE ARTIST / ORGANISER

Tao Hui (b. 1987) traversed into the art of video and installation, drawing from personal memories, visual experiences, and popular culture to weave an experimental visual narration, the focus of which is often our collective experience. Running throughout his work is a sense of misplacement vis-à-vis social identity, gender status, ethnicity, and cultural crisis, prompting viewers to come to terms with their own cultural histories and living conditions.