Catalogue of Tao Hui: Searing Pain 

Aranya Art Center is pleased to present the accompanying catalogue of the exhibition Tao Hui: Searing Pain. This is the first independently published catalogue by the Aranya Art Center, with contributions from Yuan Fuca, curator and writer, Daniel Merritt, curator and Head of Residencies at Swiss Institute (New York), Odile Burluraux, curator at Musée d’Art moderne de Paris, and Damien Zhang, director of the Aranya Art Center.

Based on Homi K. Bhabha’s concept of “unhomeliness,” Yuan Fuca proposes that, “The unhomely moment is a result of the blurred, uncertain, and ruptured boundaries between the home and the world, the private and the public in modern society.” Tao Hui’s works, she notes, “display unhomely moments in contemporary life and culture” and awaken the potential as an “intermediate state.” Merritt focuses on the new work supported and produced by the Aranya Art Center, The Night of Peacemaking (2022), and raised the question: What is a good family? His juxtaposition of Mediate Today, a program fabricated by Tao Hui, and episodes from Dr. Phil, a popular American family therapy talk show, is particularly vivid. Burluraux places Tao Hui’s work in a broader panorama of contemporary video artworks, offering a possibility to situate and locate Tao’s works within it. The connections she made between Tao Hui’s works and those of other artists and art collectives, such as General Idea, Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster, and Brice Dellsperger, are particularly illuminating. Taking the motif of snake in Tao Hui’s new work The Fall (2022) and the earlier work Autocastration (2010) as a starting point, Zhang’s text explores the relationships between image and reality, fiction and truth.

We would like to thank Aranya and Aranya International Culture Development Co., Ltd for supporting this exhibition and publishing project. This catalogue accompanies the exhibition Tao Hui: Searing Pain, on view from September 4, 2022 through February 26, 2023, organized by Damien Zhang, with the assistance of Wang Jiaming.

Curator: Damien Zhang / Editor: Jiang Ruoyu / Designer: Sun Liankun / Translators: Leah Huang, Gao Shuang / Editorial Consultant: Owen Duffy. Download a PDF of the catalogue here.