Hao Jingban: Uninvited Guests

Hao Jingban’s first solo exhibition at Blindspot Gallery—Uninvited Guests—will feature three new video works from the her most recent project using the Manchukuo of the 1930s–40s as background. The artist conducts historical investigation, archival research, field study and personal interviews, tracing back to the propaganda, drama and documentary films, as well as related figures, from the period of the Manchukuo Film Association. By weaving real and fictional narratives in video, reenactments and live performances, Hao explores the politicalness of visual language and the subjectivity of interpretation, revealing the power dynamics, border geopolitics and conflicting identities behind these performative mediums.

Forsaken Landscapes is a work integrating live performance and videos, based on several films selected and edited by the artist. These moving images include documentary and propaganda films made in the 1940–50s about Manchukuo, Dersu Uzala, a Soviet-Japanese film directed by Akira Kurosawa in 1975, and more. Filmic representations have repeatedly embellished and exploited this land, but because of various reasons, these images have become undesirable and forsaken. The artist strips the narrative from these images, leaving only a montage of landscapes, and then invites a “benshi” (a Japanese performer/ narrator for silent films) to “re-interpret” the meaning of these landscapes in a live performance. In this performance, can politics let off these Manchurian landscapes? This is a question that the artist wants to explore.

Mr. Miura Plays Masahiko Amakasu consists of an interview and theatrical reenactment, featuring the Japanese actor Miura Kenichi, who has lived in China for decades and is recognised for playing countless Japanese military villains in Chinese television and films. In the video work, Kenichi performs in a black box theatre, reenacting the role of Masahiko Amakasu, head of the Manchukuo Film Association. As history, reality and fiction intertwine and overlap, the actor experiences this double world, on- and off-screen, in the splitting and recombination of personalities and psychological states.

From South Lake Park to Hongqi Street is a dual-channel essay film based on the inquiry “What is Manchukuo Film Association,” which threads together the spaces, characters and stories related to the Manchukuo Film Association, connected by the artist’s voiceover narration. Through these narratives, the artist attempts to insert answers into the blanks that History indifferently or haphazardly left out.

We are also pleased to announce our participation in LOOP FAIR 2018 (November 20–22) with Hao Jingban’s Off Takes (2016) from her Beijing Ballroom Project. More information.

For enquiries and media interviews, please contact Mr. Nick Yu by email nick [​at​] blindspotgallery.com

Hao Jingban (b.1985, China) completed a MA in Film Studies from University of London in 2010. She has gained international recognition for her Beijing Ballroom project (2012–16), in which she traces the present ballrooms in Beijing to the two waves of ballroom dancing in the early 1950s and post-Cultural Revolution in late 1970s. Her solo exhibitions include New Directions: Hao Jingban (Ullens Center for Contemporary Art, Beijing, China, 2016) and Over-Romanticism (Taikang Space, Beijing, China, 2016). Her group exhibitions and screenings include Hao Jingban: Beijing Ballroom (Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, USA, 2018); Special Economic Zone (Guangdong Times Museum, Guangzhou, China, 2018); FRONT International: Cleveland Triennial for Contemporary Art (Cleveland, USA, 2018); Prospectif Cinéma: Performing Dramas I (Centre Pompidou, Paris, France, 2017); 11th Shanghai Biennale: Why Not Ask Again? (The Power Station of Art, Shanghai, China, 2016); Discordant Harmony (Kuandu Museum of Fine Art, Taipei, 2016 and Hiroshima MOCA, Hiroshima, Japan, 2015).