Tao Hui

1 Character & 7 Materials

For 7 Materials, Tao Hui films seven scenes selected from the countless scenarios in his notebooks, including a group of ethnic minority girls in a spoil pit in the rain, a reporter interviewing a corpse, and a deity sailing on the river. Due to the lack of internal logical order, these one-minute video “materials” are not played in a fixed sequence but randomly. For Tao Hui, to film his diary is to adorn and embellish his memories before evoking and reviving their spirits. For 1 Character, Tao Hui performs yet another act of necromancy. An audio recording reveals the identity of the missing subject: the character is a dead woman, middle-aged, with a coarse voice and an accent. Escaping the routine of country life, she realizes that she is unable to abandon the internal experiences of home after coming to the city and suffers the pains of its deception in utter solitude. The sense of displacement that the artist stresses is not only a result of visual and audio montage or in the audio narrative, but also a product of the identity loss and cultural crisis in China.