Tao Hui Hardworking, 2023

Presented on a custom-made curved screen, Hardworking is a video work that draws on the format of an informercial or online sales pitch. We encounter a host standing beside and in front of a large vertical screen, much taller than her, intend on selling TV sets, presumably seen in the boxes to her right. The host is straining to be energetic and entertaining. While acknowledging both her own loneliness, and her exploitation of her audience’s similar search for connection. At the same time, she also muses about the nature of reality in an age of digital screens. Her exhortations—both those to purchase the screens and those to reflect about the nature of reality—are accompanied by her effortless movement between levels of reality: seen entering and exiting the screen next to her, the video elides all such boundaries. By addressing the viewer of the work directly, Hardworking also blurs the distinction between us, the host and the people depicted on the screen behind her, destabilizing the separation between the layers of digital representation.