Tao Hui /
In the Land Beyond Living /
Sep 26, 2024 – Feb 2, 2025 /
JC Contemporary
Tai Kwun
10 Hollywood Road
Central, Hong Kong
Tue – Sun, 11am – 7pm
Tai Kwun Contemporary is proud to present Tao Hui’s first institutional solo exhibition in Hong Kong, In the Land Beyond Living. Through 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 folks as they navigate the ebb and flow of social development in China — from north to south, inland to coast, urban to rural, and industry to nature.
In the Land Beyond Living highlights the ways in which Tao Hui explores various individual struggles through his artistic practice. These include ethnic minorities living in the Hexi Corridor in the western province of Gansu, migrant workers eking out a living in rapidly developing cities, and new elites pursuing spiritual fulfillment. Weaving together stories of harsh conditions, migration waves, and regional disparities with the relentless search for a better life, Tao Hui forges surreal imagery and offers up new perspectives with which to understand the complexities of the contemporary present.
The exhibition features several new works especially commissioned from Tao Hui. Upon entering the gallery, visitors are greeted by a striking display of hyper-realistic yet vibrantly colourful glass chicken feet that frame the space as a threshold. This eerie yet enchanting work, entitled 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, interpreting and reflecting on contemporary social disparities and divisions, along with the choices, compromises, confrontations, or escapes they entail. The work flows in a stream-of-consciousness manner, connecting different timelines and spaces, blending reality with dreams, and leaving space for poetic and imaginative exploration.
In the Land Beyond Living constructs a distinctive 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. Through elements of sound, visuals, light, and touch, the installation prompts viewers to engage with the work on a multi-sensorial level.
The premiere of Tao Hui’s new piece Hardworking (2023) in Asia features a specially commissioned wooden sculpture resembling a melting human shape; supported on its back is a custom-designed slumped screen standing almost three metres tall. Following on 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 and hawks products by day and by 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 invites viewers to explore the codependent relationships between the screen and reality, livelihood and hardship, the self and imagery in an ever-more digitised and isolated world.
Among the newly commissioned sculptures, Cuddle, which stands atop the undulating hills, marks Tao Hui’s first experimentation with ceramics and stone as materials. A petrified serpent coils tightly around a ceramic toilet, crushing it to the point of near rupture. The tension in the piece, though 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.