Introduction

Aranya Art Center is pleased to present Searing Pain, Chinese artist Tao Hui’s first comprehensive solo museum exhibition. Searing Pain surveys the first decade of Tao’s career, focusing on his groundbreaking videos and installations. This exhibition will showcase 18 works made between 2013-2022, including projects never seen in mainland China, such as the installation Untitled (wind cups) (2017) and the video installation White Building (2019), as well as three groups of new works supported and produced by Aranya Art Center: the video The Night of Peacemaking, a large-scale sculpture The Fall, and the photographic series Untitled (Holographic Building 06 & 07).

Tao Hui was born in 1987 in the mountain village of Yunyang near Chongqing, China, and now lives and works in Beijing. Drawing inspiration from personal memories, television, and popular culture, Tao distills and weaves them into experimental visual narratives and film styles. Running throughout his practice is a sense of misplacement, explored through such subjects as social identity, gender, ethnicity, and cultural crisis. He sets up absurd, paradoxical, and melodramatic scenes with characters brimming with metaphor. Tao reveals our shared contemporary experiences and prompts us to face our own cultural histories, living conditions, and subjectivities.

In parallel to his artistic endeavors, Tao is a productive writer, penning most of the scripts of his own video works. The exhibition’s title comes from his unpublished novel Toad Bell, which is about an encounter between a young male laborer and a middle-aged female factory worker, both seeking companionship. In conjunction with the exhibition, Aranya Art Center will also release the artist’s latest publication in collaboration with Aranya Library and present the artist’s newest sound work on the podcast LandingOnAir.

The opening of Searing Pain will coincide with the Aranya Waves Film Festival. Searing Pain will be on view from September 4, 2022 – February 5, 2023. The exhibition is organized by Damien Zhang, director of Aranya Art Center, with the assistance of Wang Jiaming.

Info via WeChat