3.17／2016 － 4.16／2016
Artist: Hao Jingban
Artistic Director: Tang Xin
Curator: Li Jia
【Exhibition Briefing】
As her first individual project, “Over-romanticism” condenses and further elaborate the artist’s favored motif and characteristic method which run through most of her work and research. “Dancing in a historical context” plays as a key word for this exhibition, which is presented by way of integrating different medium like photography, video and sound. Here the artist fosters a prosaism narrative exploring the complexity of the interaction between individual experience and historical texture with her personal voice. Dancing, as the converging point of visceral experience, inner feeling and the broader scope of history and society, is incessantly shaped, moderated and disciplined by the (in) visible power of ideology and the specific execution of culture politics, hence cannot be retained simply through body movement and instant cognition under a live scene. Focusing on plenty of details while creating a diversity of nexus among historical slices, Hao Jingban, in this exhibition, unveils the fabric and layers of an obscure massive consists of the things and their representation, experiences, memory, reality and its reflection.
This project includes three parts. Part I consists of three photos. A set of two photos captured a monitor screen showing the portraits of three women at a ballroom in today’s Beijing, the other is a smaller snapshot of the artist at work: Hao turns her back to the audience while looking into another monitor screen. In Part II, a video (around 30’) is repetitively played: A woman is waiting her partner on a stage illuminated by spotlight before performing in front of audience in a official party celebrating the 72 anniversary of the birth of CCP. Part III is mainly about voice and sound including the oral narration of some female dancers (the artist also takes part in the reading), as well as the ambience sound of the celebration event for the 72 anniversary of the foundation of CCP. Rich in details, the show opens up an even broader range of memory and history.
Hao Jingban, born in 1985. Currently lives and works in Beijing. Graduated from Goldsmiths College, London with a Bachelor’s degree in Media and Communication, 2007, and from University of London with a Master degree in Film Studies, 2010. Hao Jingban’s practices revolves around that image as a way to narrate the history and the descriptive and critical potentials of the language of image. Through long term observation and experiences with her subjects and topics, she is able to engage in-depth exchange with her subjects. She believes strongly an artist’s devotion and the abilities of image to participate, acknowledge and describe the realty.
【About the Light Pavilion Project】
As a site for individual project, “Light Pavilion” is initiated in 2012, based on the second floor of Taikang Space. It aims at providing a flexible platform for artists to realize their ambitions. After an interval of two years, “Light Pavilion” is restarted in 2016, embracing a vision always open to uncertainty, complicity and detournement. It’s not only a site for sensational immersion and experiential evocation but also a forum dedicated to diversity and otherness.
【About Taikang Space】
Taikang Space is a non-profit art organization founded in 2003 by Taikang Life Insurance Ltd, with the concept of “retrospection and encouragement”, it showcases thoughts and evaluations in the field of contemporary Chinese art, by which it aims to build a platform that provokes the artists’ potentials and in-depth research and exchange.
