Tao Hui: Searing Pain

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 The exhibition’s title comes from his unpublished novel Toad Bell, which is about an encounter between a young male laborer and a middle-aged female factory worker, both seeking companionship.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 through February 5, 2023. The exhibition is organized by Damien Zhang, director of Aranya Art Center, with the assistance of Wang Jiaming.

Searing Pain
A snake falls from above and explodes into pieces. Only its tail remains. The Fall (2022) is a new sculptural work by the artist Tao Hui newly commissioned for his solo exhibition Searing Pain at the Aranya Art Center. Although known primarily for his experimental films and videos, Tao has in fact made sculptures since 2010. In the work Autocastration (2010), a snake’s tail, powered by a built-in motor that rotates at a steady speed, emits an ear-piercing yip, evoking a painful moan of self-mutilation. Contemplate the tail’s polished and sleek skin. What do we have here? Is it a vessel for narcissism or a well of sentimentality? And so the youthful artist projects a curious gaze toward his own body.

It is a tricky exercise for the human eye to discern a snake’s tail from its body, and the “tail” that Tao tenderly caresses is, however, unnecessary for humans. It is the artist’s metaphor for his incessant investigation into the sequelae of today’s highly mediated society. He plumbs our emotional excesses and sentimental remnants at both the individual and collective levels. Whether it is the Iranian actress dressed in bridal attire in The Dusk of Tehran (2014), the middle-aged woman wearing a kitsch floral dress in Pulsating Atom (2019), or the lonely figure speaking into the void over his phone in Hello, Finale! (2017), these emotionally charged characters weave together a shared fate of pot-holed roads and unrequited love, as well as the agony of being “left behind.”

From the quiet mountain village of Yunyang, Chongqing to Beijing, Tao experienced his own highs and woes. Personal experiences become the source material for his art. “My role in it will flicker like a speck of dust between the light and the dark, between laughter and tears,” as Roberto Bolaño appropriately describes in The Savage Detectives. 

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Media contact: Liangjiao Gao, gaoliangjiao [​at​] aranya.cc / T +86 138 1143 1757.