Tao Hui
陶辉
April 19, 2018–May 19, 2018The Breeder, Athens
THE BREEDER is pleased to present emerging Chinese artist Tao Hui’ s first solo exhibition in Greece. Tao Hui’s work investigates the theatrics of everyday life both fictional and real.
Presented in the gallery’s ground floor Joint Images consists of ten videos. We hear their protagonists sometimes in despair, others in sorrow or emotion as they experience moments of emotional tension, while we view a parallel televised world. With melodramatic disposition the work examines the possibility of a universalized experience, as we all face collective stimuli through new technologies and the Internet. The artist questions the relationship between the core of society and its peripheries, through the ideas and values that unite us, and those that divide us.
The Dusk of Tehran, which is exhibited in the basement of the gallery, was made during Tao Hui ‘s residency in Tehran in 2014. It re-contextualizes the words used by famous pop stat Anita Mui (1963-2003) who had a huge career in Hong Kong and East Asia, to address her fans in her highly personal farewell performance, delivered wearing a bridal gown, a month before her death. The inner theatre of Mui’s romantic dreams, regrets and sadness at the seemingly arbitrary nature of life are re-told through a young Iranian actress as she travels in the backseat of a car, dressed as a bride. The romantic realism of the speech adopts a political poignancy as the car passes through the streets of Tehran.
In Acting Tutorial we follow a performance workshop where actors are practicing scenes of tension and passion. The bare set and lack of equipment brings the expressions and emotions in the foreground, while the collectiveness of the experience is culminated in a surreal scene of catharsis.
Born in the Yunyang, the Chongqing Province of China, much of Tao Hui’s work is shaped by his experience of growing up in a rural community. For rural towns and villages that lived in proximate isolation for millennia, radio, television and film provided the sole portal through which communities were exposed to urban mores and popular culture. Tao Hui speaks of the inhabitants of his village as possessing the power to blend memory, folklore, and reality, a place where the effects of psychological disorders are considered normal and thus incorporated into their collective understanding of reality. These experiences are reflected in Tao Hui’s work, where fiction and reality blend seamlessly.
Tao Hui (b. 1987 Yunyang, Chongqing, China) has graduated from Sichuan Fine Arts Institute and he lives and works in Beijing. He recently exhibited his work in Rockbund Art Museum in Shanghai, shortlisted for Hugo Boss Asia Art Award (2017). He also recently completed a residency with the Rauschenberg Foundation in the US (March-April 2018).
Selected solo shows: Not at all, OCAT Xi’an, China (2017), New Direction: Tao Hui, UCCA, Beijing (2015), 1 Character & 7 Materials, Aike-Dellarco, Shanghai, China (2015).
Tao Hui has exhibited his work in group shows in prestigious museums and institutions in China and the rest of the world including the Centre Pompidou and the Louis Vuitton Foundation in Paris; chi K11 art museum, Minsheng Art Museum and New Century Art Foundation in Shanghai; MOCA Taipei in Taiwan; Beijing Minsheng Art Museum, National Museum of China, Red Brick Art Museum, Times Art Museum in Beijing and more.
