Tao Hui: Performance Fragments in Phone Screens

2020.12.27 Sunday 17:00

Location

Douyin

Information

Language: Chinese
Douyin Account: Macallinearts
Schedule: 5:00–6:30 pm
Initiator: Tao Hui
Moderator: Leo Li Chen
Guests: Bao Dong, Liu Yefu, Wang Xingwei and Yuan Fuca 

 

In his short video series Similar Disguise (2020), Tao Hui represents the universality of performance gestures in short mobile videos and shows how users find their own identities through layers of disguises. The live stream event “Performance Fragments in Phone Screens” will further explore the characteristics of the mobile phone screen as a medium and the demonstrative time and space of that medium.

This live stream event is moderated by curator Chen Li. By imitating and transforming the interview segment of a variety show, the artist and moderator will explore and discuss, together with artist and curator guests, the subjects of visual culture, online identity, and everyday performances in contemporary society.

About the Initiator

Tao Hui

Tao Hui was born in 1987 in Yunyang, Chongqing, China. He graduated from the Sichuan Fine Arts Institute with a BFA in oil painting in 2010. He currently lives and works in Beijing, China. 

Despite his degree in oil painting, Tao has moved toward video and installation, drawing from personal memories, visual experiences, and popular culture to weave an experimental visual narrative, 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 Contemporary Art Archive Distinction Award from the Sichuan Fine Arts Institute in 2008 and the Art Sanya & Huayu Youth Award in Sanya in 2015. He also won the Grand Prize at the 19th Contemporary Art Festival Sesc_Videobrasil and was shortlisted for the Hugo Boss Asia Art Award for Emerging Asian Artists and the international competition sector of the Kino der Kunst Festival in 2017. In 2019, he was shortlisted for the inaugural Sigg Prize by M+ in Hong Kong.

 

About the Host

Leo Li Chen

Leo Li Chen is a curator and researcher based in Beijing, China, working as Director of Research in Magician Space, Beijing. His main research interests focus on aesthetic politics, geopolitics, performativity and moving images. He was the curator of The Racing Will Continue, The Dancing Will Stay (Guangdong Times Museum, Guangzhou, 2019); Today Could Have Been a Happy Day (Taikang Space, Beijing, 2018); That Has Been and Maybe Again (Para Site, Hong Kong, 2016); Adrift (OCAT, Shenzhen, 2016), and so on. 

Chen is a long-term contributing writer for Artforum China and Leap. He was a resident researcher at Asia Art Archive Hong Kong in 2016, and MMCA Korea in 2019. In 2021, he will conduct his research in a curation residency in New York, supported by Asian Cultural Council’s Fellowship. 

 

About the Guest

Bao Dong

Bao Dong is an art critic and independent curator based in Beijing,founder and art director of Beijing Contemporary Art Expo. In contributing essays to the artistic dialogue and other forms of involvement, Bao has established himself as a leading curator and critic of work by the new generation. His articles have been widely published in art journals and artist monographs both at home and abroad. He has curated many exhibitions for a wide range of art institutions including Ullens Center for Contemporary Art, the Art Center of Chulalongkorn University, Guangdong Times Museum, Shanghai Minsheng Art Museum, etc. He was awarded Asian Cultural Council (ACC) fellowship grant in 2014, and became a nominee of Independent Curators International’s (ICI) 2014 Independent Vision Curatorial Award. Recently he was awarded Yishu Awards for Curating Contemporary Chinese Art 2016.

Liu Yefu

Liu Yefu (b. 1986, Beijing) currently lives and works in Beijing. Liu adopts video art, installation, and mixed media, whose practice influenced by popular culture and folk art, playfully comments on the chaos and restlessness of social realities. By appropriating everyday life scenes, readymade, inexpensive materials, Liu presents the ideologies, clichés, and bias drawn from history, ethnicity, and personal memories. 

Liu’s recent works have been exhibited at Magician Space (Beijing, 2018, 2016), Tai Kwun Contemporary (Hong Kong, 2019), Gene Siskel Film Center (Chicago, 2019), OCAT Museum, (2018, Beijing), He Xiangning Museum (Shenzhen, 2017), Ullens Center of Contemporary Art (Beijing, 2017), YUZ Museum (Shanghai, 2016), Kimberly-Klark Gallery, (New York, 2015), etc.

Yuan Fuca

Yuan Fuca is currently the Chief Curator-at-Large at the Macalline Art Center. Her recent curatorial and research interests include the history of avant-garde performance, the formation of power and knowledge in contemporary performance practices, and the inherent logic of exhibition production and how it shapes thought. She also enjoys working with artists, and in this process, she has participated in building artistic communities and re-defining the rhetoric of identity among cultural workers.  

Yuan Fuca has curated group exhibitions and projects including “Come Together: Surviving Sandy” (Dedalus Foundation, 2013), “Toward the Emergence of Resistance: Disarming Charm” (Taikang Space, 2016), “Self-Criticism: Adequate Instructions” (Inside-Out Art Museum, 2017), “The Ecstasy of Time: Reframing the Medium of Knowing” (He Xiangning Art Museum, 2017), “The Day the Gods Stop Laughing” (Duddell’s, 2018), and the Offshore Residency Program (Ara Dinawan, 2019), as well as solo shows for artists such as Jiang Zhi, Liu Yefu, and Timur Si-Qin. From 2016 to 2019, she co-founded and managed Salt Projects, a non-profit art space that offered a site for action and exchange among young artists and practitioners.

Yuan’s writing has been published on platforms including Artforum, Artnews, BOMB, LEAP, Modern Painters, New York Times T Magazine, Flash Art, Frieze, Randian, and Yishu. She has done editing and publishing work for many independent art magazines, and she is one of founding editors of Heichi, the online bilingual publishing platform affiliated with the Macalline Art Center.

Wang Xingwei

Wang Xingwei (b. 1969 in Shenyang, China) currently lives and works in Beijing. He received his formative painting training at Normal School of Shenyang University. His early work includes dialogues with classics of Western art history, and skepticism and criticism of the local Chinese art scene. After entering the middle of his artistic career, he has gradually developed a unique style, and continues the exploration of the basic issues of painting, including the conscious transmission and the repetition of images. 

Wang Xingwei often depicts scenes that are ambiguous, irrelevant, absurd, vulgar, scandalous and laughable. His plots are often unexpected, far-fetched, and yet charmingly surreal. Perhaps it is better to interpret the diverse themes of Wang Xingwei’s works, and his agile pivoting between a wide variety of painting styles, from within a wider context. 

Wang Xingwei has been widely exhibited in China and abroad. Recent solo shows include dual solo exhibitions The Code of Physiognomy and Shenyang Night held respectively at Galerie Urs Meile Beijing’s 798 space and Caochangdi Space (2019);  Honor and Disgrace, Organized by Galerie Urs Meile, Beijing-Lucerne, and supported by Platform China (2016); the large retrospective Wang Xingwei, Ullens Center for Contemporary Art, Beijing, China (2013). Group shows include: Forget the Horizon, chi K11 art museum (Shanghai), Shanghai, China (2020); Chinese Whispers 中国私语 - Recent Art from the Sigg Collection, MAK Museum für Angewandte Kunst, Vienna, Austria (2019).

Tao Hui’s Artwork

Similar Disguise, Tao Hui, 1'11", 2020

Similar Disguise, Tao Hui, 1'43", 2020

Similar Disguise, Tao Hui, 2'09", 2020

Similar Disguise, Tao Hui, 1'37", 2020

Similar Disguise, Tao Hui, 1'32", 2020

Video

The Macalline Center of Art (MACA) is a non-profit art institution located in the 798 Art District of Beijing and officially inaugurated its space on January 15, 2022. Occupying a two-story building with a total area of 900 square meters, MACA unites artists, curators, and other art and cultural practitioners from around the world. Through its diverse, ongoing, and collaborative approaches, the Center establishes a new site on the contemporary art scene. Guided by the “work of artists” and backed by interdisciplinary research, the Center aims to bring together a community passionate about art and devoted to the “contemporary” moment so as to respond proactively to our rapidly evolving times.