Tao Hui, Sunset in Tehran, 2014. Tao Hui, an artist born in 1987 in rural Chongqing, likes to say that his path into art bears little resemblance to that of colleagues who grew up steeped in the art world from childhood.
"I'm a kid from the countryside who moved to a town, then a county seat, then Chongqing, and finally to a metropolis like Beijing. Along the way I watched the whole country change, and that journey is what built the work I make now." His video pieces hold realism and fantasy in the same frame, telling poetic stories about ordinary people in the language of the street, tracing the marks an era leaves behind, and probing the relationship between mass media and the people who watch it -- and are watched by it in turn. Portrait of the artist Tao Hui. His major solo exhibition, "A Scalding Ache," is currently on view at Aranya Art Center, bringing together eighteen works made between 2013 and today, each installed within its own constructed setting and spread across five galleries -- an attempt to lead visitors into a world built from cultural history, social phenomena, and questions of identity.
As the show opened, we sat down with this sensitive, shy "big kid" to talk about his work and his life. Tao Hui, The Only Concrete Person (2018). Installation view, "A Scalding Ache," Aranya Art Center, 2022. Photo: Sun Shi. Walking through the exhibition, many visitors find themselves surprised: video art that can feel opaque and difficult, arranged in just the right setting, can pull you into a dream the moment you step through the door. In a vast, dim, empty space shaped like an amphitheater, The Only Concrete Person plays on, unattended, on a small screen overhead.
The vastness of the room and the smallness of the screen play off each other, echoing the exhibition's title. "A Scalding Ache" comes from a line in a short story Tao Hui wrote himself, Toad Bell, used there to describe a particular state the protagonist falls into.
"Zhang Zhenzhong, the director of Aranya Art Center, felt the line captured both my work and the intent of the whole show, so we took it as the title," Tao Hui says. Installation view, "A Scalding Ache," Aranya Art Center, 2022. Photo: Sun Shi. Tao Hui, White Building (2019). Installation view, "A Scalding Ache," Aranya Art Center, 2022. Photo: Sun Shi. White Building had never before been shown on the Chinese mainland.
The artist has moved something like a data-center control console into the museum. Four screens run in a row up top; below sits a cabinet built in the style of Western modernist architecture, with louvered shutters and a raised, stilt-like base that make the whole thing read as a small building. Some of the shutters actually open; others are just decorative cutouts. The screens play documentary footage of the Hukou Waterfall and the Ansai waist drums of northern Shaanxi -- but the sound we hear is a waterfall layered with African drumming, entirely out of sync with what we're watching.
"It's meant to feel like a relay station for secondhand information -- gathering data, sorting and processing it, then passing a signal on to the next station. What I wanted to get at is how much of what reaches us today is garbled, impossible to fully parse," Tao Hui tells us. Tao Hui, Untitled (Anemometer), 2017. Installation view, "A Scalding Ache," Aranya Art Center, 2022. Photo: Sun Shi. "The anemometer cups are anthropomorphic, in a way -- a portrait of people living now."
Tao Hui says he's always noticing anemometers of one shape or another mounted on utility poles and buildings, spinning all day in the wind -- an activity that looks pointless but is, in fact, quietly recording wind direction and speed. He modified a set of these cups himself, fitting small mirrors inside them so that in sunlight they throw off light like a disco ball, then added metal chains until the whole assembly looked like a decorated Christmas tree.
"It was a kind of self-portrait at the time -- the idea that we might occasionally throw off some light or shine while we're spinning, but really we're just there, turning and turning for no reason at all." Installation view, "A Scalding Ache," Aranya Art Center, 2022. Photo: Sun Shi. Tao Hui, Fall (2022). Installation view, "A Scalding Ache," Aranya Art Center, 2022. Photo: Sun Shi. One sculpture in the gallery draws every eye: a snake's tail, rendered in a raw, bloodied tangle of flesh.
The sculpture sits on a white stage half-curtained in pink PVC sheeting -- a setting Tao Hui designed deliberately. "A stage gives the piece a sense of ceremony. It makes the audience feel the snake has fallen as part of some performance, not as a routine occurrence. Leaving the curtain half-open creates an effect that's both open and withheld." Tao Hui says he has an unusual fascination with snakes, traceable to the ghost stories his grandmother told him as a child and to watching the television series The Legend of the White Snake. To him, snakes carry something divine, capable of being read differently depending on the cultural context.
In the new work Fall, the scattered tail and flesh serve as a metaphor -- a state of falling.
"There was news last year about a plane crash, so when I was making this piece I tried to render that 'bloody' state as truthfully as I could." Tao Hui, Untitled (Holographic Architecture 06 & 07) (2022). Installation view, "A Scalding Ache," Aranya Art Center, 2022. Photo: Sun Shi. Untitled (Holographic Architecture 06 & 07) continues a photographic series Tao Hui has been developing around discarded real-estate scale models. For this new work, he went digging through the warehouse of an Aranya housing development to find the model he used.
"A few years back, when the real estate market was booming, developers would sell out a project and just leave the scale model sitting in a warehouse. To me those discarded models are worth commemorating, worth preserving -- so I record them using holographic imaging."
"One of the ways we look at the world is through imagination. A hologram is actually flat, but it looks three-dimensional -- you think you're seeing all the information, but it's really just a plane," Tao Hui says. Tao Hui, Night Shoot (2022). Installation view, "A Scalding Ache," Aranya Art Center, 2022. Photo: Sun Shi. Night Shoot, Tao Hui says, was the most labor-intensive piece in the show.
He used the popular mediation show Gold Medal Mediation as his template, scripting a fictional mediation session and the story behind it. To Tao Hui, these mediation shows, despite their performative streak, can sometimes feel more real than reality itself.
"A lot went wrong in the middle of shooting the mediation scene. I wasn't just filming the mediation itself -- I was filming the whole production process, including the problems that came up along the way, and in the end I had to step in myself to handle things when they went sideways on set." What we see in the gallery is the shooting set transplanted whole into the exhibition space, as if we too were part of the production crew, watching two out-of-control parties, an absurdly soapy story unfold, and the artist himself appear on screen as a mediator trying to broker peace.
The whole experience is charged with a sense of presence, of being there. A photo of a young Tao Hui sketching from life. His affection for this rough, unpretentious, street-level texture has everything to do with how he grew up.
"My life experience shaped how I make work and how I think, to a large degree. Both my parents were rural schoolteachers, so I grew up in the countryside. Later, when their jobs moved, we went to a town, and then from the town to a county seat. I finished school in the county seat and went to college in Chongqing," Tao Hui says. Tao Hui, Vibrating Atoms (2019). Installation view, "A Scalding Ache," Aranya Art Center, 2022. Photo: Sun Shi. After college in Chongqing, he came to Beijing, like so many young people chasing a foothold in the capital.
At first he worked odd jobs, assisted other artists, and drafted proposals and pieces to submit to open competitions and exhibitions. Little by little, people in the field began to know his name, to recognize the work, to invite him into residencies and shows -- and that was how he became a professional artist.
"I went, step by step, from a village kid to someone living and working in a city as big as Beijing. Along the way I watched China's economy develop and its society transform." Tao Hui, Unbridled, 2021. Tao Hui, Unbridled, production still, 2022. Tao Hui folded that sense of a society hurtling forward into his work Unbridled, in which a girl on roller skates glides ceaselessly through one setting after another.
"Roller skating was a popular sport in our generation -- it had just become an Asian Games event, so it carried something of the spirit of the era. And putting on skates is itself a kind of acceleration, which happens to track with the pace of our economic development," Tao Hui says. In the film, the girl keeps humming campus folk songs popular in the seventies and eighties, a genre whose popularity has since faded. The acceleration of the skates against the decline of the folk songs becomes a metaphor for the psychological pressure people feel inside a booming, ever-rising era -- a kind of conflict, a kind of bewilderment.
Tao Hui, Unbridled, production still, 2022. On set, Tao Hui's friend Cao Yixiao shot a large number of cinematic, richly composed stills. They don't simply duplicate the film -- in a sense, the stills form their own narrative. Throughout the piece, the girl drifts on her skates through settings that will feel deeply familiar, whether from our own lives or from film and television.
"There's the kind of scene you see constantly in palace dramas -- red walls, yellow-tiled roofs, the old imperial architecture. Then there's Republican-era old Shanghai, and more mundane settings, too -- construction sites at museums, science centers." Tao Hui, Unbridled, production still, 2022. Tao Hui tells us he spent a long time searching for the right actress to lead the film.
"I auditioned a lot of actresses and none of them quite fit. The requirements were demanding -- she needed to project a certain lost, bewildered quality, be able to skate, be able to sing, and have strong enough delivery to handle lines that are genuinely tongue-twisting." Eventually a museum staff member recommended Zhi Hui, who was studying performance in Toronto, and it clicked immediately.
"The moment we met, I felt her presence matched exactly what I'd imagined, and she was very skilled besides. By the time we finished shooting, we'd become good friends," Tao Hui says, smiling. Tao Hui, A Person and Seven Types of Material (2015). Installation view, "A Scalding Ache," Aranya Art Center, 2022. Photo: Sun Shi. "When I was a kid I watched a lot of shows like Flying Fox of Snowy Mountain and The Legend of the White Snake. Looking back, that was my earliest exposure to the moving image.
Later on, European cinema left a deeper mark on me," Tao Hui says. Many people note a soap-opera quality running through his work, one that echoes the fragmentary, melodramatic texture of Pedro Almodóvar's films.
"I really do love Almodóvar -- he's been a huge influence on me." Tao Hui, A Comparable Manner, production still, 2021. This range shows up across his body of work: on one end, Sunset in Tehran, made during a residency in Iran, which grapples with weighty social phenomena and issues; on the other, A Comparable Manner, a vertical short posted directly to Douyin, built entirely out of the platform's most fashionable visual styling. Tao Hui, Sunset in Tehran, 2014. Installation view, "A Scalding Ache," Aranya Art Center, 2022. Photo: Sun Shi. Tao Hui tells us Sunset in Tehran holds special weight in his career -- it was the piece that brought him to wider attention and opened up more opportunities.
In the film, an Iranian girl, hemmed in by any number of social constraints, re-enacts inside a private car a conversation the late Hong Kong star Anita Mui once had with a fan at a concert -- a way of showing how people from entirely different nations and regions, plugged into the same narrative frame, pursue -- and are constrained in pursuing -- love and marriage, similarly and differently. Tao Hui says that just a week before the work was due, he was still wandering around Iran with no direction, no idea what he was going to make.
"I was riding a bus across the desert, and the sunset was falling across the girl in the seat next to me, and Anita Mui's 'Song of the Setting Sun' happened to be playing in my headphones. Suddenly it all connected," Tao Hui says. Tao Hui, Acting Course, 2014. Acting Course marks another significant turning point for him personally -- the work where he began to think through the relationship between performance and mass media, between watching and being watched. The idea came out of a conversation with his mother.
"My mom used to love watching Hunan TV dramas, and afterward she'd keep imitating things the characters did. I told her to stop watching so much, and she said, 'It's not that I'm imitating the shows -- they're filming me.' That got me thinking about our relationship with mass media: are they recording us, or are we imitating them?" Tao Hui says. He carries himself with a quiet, sensitive melancholy that seems shared among a certain kind of artist, but at the same time he's unpretentious about ordinary pleasures -- he'll tell you outright that he loves his phone, loves scrolling short videos.
"I don't think you need to deliberately avoid new things, or approach them with hostility -- better to just accept them with an easy conscience." He tells us he's essentially two different people depending on whether he's shooting. When there's no work on, when things are quiet, he mostly stays home: answers emails in the morning, makes his own breakfast. By midday he might even walk to the market to buy vegetables and cook lunch himself.
In the afternoon, some desk work. Tao Hui editing. "When I'm shooting, that whole stretch of time I'm anxious, wound tight, definitely not cooking for myself -- just ordering whatever delivery, day after day." A shoot usually only lasts a day or two, Tao Hui says, and plenty of what happens on set is entirely beyond his control.
"You might get to the location and suddenly be told you can't shoot after all, or the actors and crew can't align their schedules and everything falls out of sync." It may be exactly this kind of friction that triggers the occasional emotional crash he has during the creative process.
"For me, the hardest part isn't the creative work itself -- it's staying emotionally steady. If I get thrown off balance halfway through, I just don't want to work anymore. I want to shelve the whole project and disappear from the world for a while." Tao Hui at work on set. And yet he's also someone who grits it out and gets things done. His own description of himself is exactly right: "loose, but tenacious." On any given production he wears many hats at once -- producer, director, writer, casting director.
"There's a lot I want to control, and my process doesn't really follow the standard film production pipeline, so the crew members I hire for a given shoot often don't fully grasp what I'm going for. I end up spending a lot of time just explaining things to them," Tao Hui says. Tao Hui, On the Body (2013). Installation view, "A Scalding Ache," Aranya Art Center, 2022. Photo: Sun Shi. Tao Hui, From Sichuan to Shenzhen, 2017. Because so much of Tao Hui's work is video-based, it sits close to territory now claimed by the metaverse, NFTs, AR, and VR. We asked whether he had plans in that direction, but the artist says he's never really considered it -- which has to do with how he wants his audience to experience his work in the first place.
"Even though I work in video, and some of my themes touch on the virtual, I think what I make is fundamentally physical -- sound installations, for instance, that need to be experienced in the gallery, in person. Looking isn't simple. It's not just something you do with your eyes; sometimes you need your whole body to take it in," Tao Hui says. Tao Hui at work on set. Tao Hui preparing a sound project at Vancouver Co-op Radio. As an artist born in the 1980s, Tao Hui has, in fact, already achieved a great deal.
But in conversation he stays warm, modest, unpretentious -- talking to him feels less like an interview than catching up with a friend. He has funneled his sensitivity, his darker and more anxious moods, his reflections on mass media, and his hunger for poetry in everyday life into his work, which frees him, in ordinary life, to be someone calm and grounded in the small pleasures. When we asked what he hoped audiences would feel after seeing his new show, he laughed and said: "If they make it all the way through, I'll already be happy."
Editor: Huang Xirui. Editorial oversight: Deng Kailei. Images courtesy of the artist, Kiang Malingue, and Aranya Art Center.