Tai Kwun Contemporary in Hong Kong is currently presenting the solo exhibition Tao Hui: In the Land Beyond Living, on view from September 26, 2024 - February 02, 2025. It is the first offering in the institution’s new Breakthrough series, which spotlights contemporary artists at key moments in their careers. In the case of Hui (b. 1987), the Chinese artist has been keeping a close eye on the explosion of social media in China, among other newfound interests such as television dramas and Mandarin pop music. At Tai Kwun, he presents a mesmerising landscape that criticises and satirises modern life through various works spanning sculpture, film, painting and more. While digital communication and engagement are but a facet of the exhibition’s larger focus, Hui’s meditations on these seemingly inextricable elements of our daily lives are quite compelling. Jill Angel Chun, associate curator at Tai Kwun Contemporary and organiser of the show, joins STIR for an interview that explores Hui’s perspective on human interaction in the digital age.

The compositions and viewing experiences of social media and video platforms today have anchored the way Tao Hui observes the lives of others and explores the language of video.
– Jill Angel Chun, associate curator, Tai Kwun Contemporary

In the Land Beyond Living invites visitors to wander through a space that has been designed to be strange and liminal, at once familiar and alien. The solo exhibition opens up with Money Grab Hand (2024). The installation consists of strings of lifelike chicken feet made out of coloured glass. In many parts of China, the grabbing gesture of chicken feet is seen to symbolise the accrual of wealth and they are therefore talismans of good fortune. The strangely delicate commission prompts audiences to reflect on the arbitrary value that human beings place on objects. Money Grab Hand also serves as a threshold at the exhibition hall, guiding audiences towards the title work, Land Beyond Living. Yet, the exhibition’s centrepiece is an audio-visual installation titled Chilling Terror Sweeps the North (2024), a love story told in a stream-of-consciousness manner. It reflects on social disparities and divisions within contemporary Chinese society and intentionally leaves space for audience interpretation.

Further in the exhibition space, audiences encounter Hardworking (2023-2024), a video installation featuring a short film focused on online livestreaming culture. The film is just under 13 minutes long and presents a streamer engaging with their audience in a slightly absurd way. The host of the livestream is trying to sell a television set that is larger than her and she denigrates herself by acknowledging her loneliness. At the same time, she pokes fun at her audience, highlighting their lack of human connection. She also muses about the nature of reality in an increasingly digital world and appears to effortlessly step in and out of the television screen. The film is projected onto a large, curved wooden panel that creates the impression of viewing the work on a limp smartphone screen. At its back, the video installation is propped up by a wood sculpture of a melting human being, which references how the livestreamer is being depleted by the emotionally taxing nature of her work.

The exhibition note explains that Hardworking explores the interconnected relationship between screen and reality. The contemporary artist criticises the live streaming economy, where the screens of smart devices divide increasingly lonely and alienated individuals on one end and overworked and equally lonely streamers who feel compelled to humiliate themselves on the other. Chun tells STIR, “...the compositions and viewing experiences of social media and video platforms today have anchored the way Tao Hui observes the life of others and explores the language of video.” The artist treats video and the internet as more than tools of communication. He identifies them rightly as tools of masking and transformation. In conversation with Chun, it becomes easy to think of the various forms of social media, including livestreaming culture, as a modern phenomenon that is comparable to substance addiction, a reality netizens around the world are waking up to. As she tells STIR, “Many do, however, notice how the invisible hand of algorithms is dictating our lives, trapping us in echo chambers where we consume and numb ourselves.”

Hui’s contemporary art on display at In the Land Beyond Living explores various topics connected to modern life and highlights the compelling chokehold that social media platforms possess over us. Technology, intended to bring people closer, has ironically created more social alienation than ever before. While the show does not offer easy answers to the ongoing loneliness epidemic, Hui’s art may stay with audiences long after the exhibition ends, prompting them to think of their roles in the engagement economy.

‘In the Land Beyond Living’ is on view at Tai Kwun Contemporary, Hong Kong from September 26, 2024 - February 02, 2025.