2025.05.30 Friday 21:00
Location
Fotografiska, No.127 Guangfu Road, Jing’an District, Shanghai
Performers: Tao Hui, Chen Haofei
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After every bout of emotional anxiety or crisis in intimate relationships, Tao Hui always seeks solace in outdoor activities. On one hand, physical exercise stimulates the release of endorphins and dopamine, alleviating anxiety at a physiological level; on the other, the vastness of nature dilutes the weight of our worries. In this atomized era where individuals grow increasingly isolated, people strive to escape the superficial comfort of screens and return to tangible reality. The "outdoors," as an antithesis to domesticity, individualism, and structured systems, transcends the boundaries of daily routines and institutional constraints. It symbolizes escape, freedom, and unpredictability. Yet a lingering question remains: After experiencing such pure liberation of the body, can we still willingly retreat to the confined yet secure "indoors"? Or have we, with each venture outward, subtly altered the way we return?
Tao Hui was born in Yunyang, Chongqing, China. He graduated from Sichuan Fine Arts Institute with a BFA in Oil Painting in 2010 and currently lives and works in Beijing, China. Tao 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 the audience to face their own cultural histories and living conditions. He won the special award of Contemporary Art Archive from Sichuan Fine Arts Institute in 2008 and ‘Art Sanya & Huayu Youth Award’ in Sanya in 2015. He also won the grand prize of 19th “Contemporary Art Festival Sesc Videobrasil”, and was shortlisted for “HUGO BOSS ASIA ART Award for Emerging Asian Artists” and International Competition sector of the KINO DER KUNST festival in 2017. In 2019, he is shortlisted for the inaugural Sigg Prize. In 2021, he is nominated for the 7th edition of Jimei x Arles International Photo Festival ‘Discovery Award’.
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VORTEX, launched by the MACA in Shanghai in 2022, is an art and cultural salon in the form of lecture performances occurring once or twice every month. The programme calls for non-institutionalised artistic and academic production in which contemporary art practitioners and scholars get to explore cross-disciplinarily the issues of the macro or micro, the global or local, the collective or individual. VORTEX, hence, is where you spin in the whirlpool of spontaneous whims and intuitive approaches represented by individual research and enquiries. Being present here at VORTEX, you are experiencing versatile forms of lecture performances that experiment with new mechanisms and methodologies.
