Tao Hui

Imitating the narrative flows of a reality show, Tao creates a fictional scene of mediation, presenting a Chinese family’s complex relationship dynamics. As the plot unfolds, Tao highlights the touchy feelings and melodramatic relationships between the scene’s women. The tension between characters, as well as the film’s final chaotic climax, continuously explore character roles and their performativity. Tao recreates scenes from the night of the shoot and invites the audience to join and watch it “live,” thereby creating a passage from reality into this fictional world.

Mongolism is among Tao Hui's very early films, produced when the artist was still in art school at the Sichuan Fine Arts Institute in Chongqing. The characters of Tao Hui's early films are loosely based on popular costume dramas from 1990s Chinese television. Shot in brilliant color, the film follows a young protagonist clad in bright green historical costume. Yet from the beginning, narrative levels are interwoven as a contemporary figure is shown putting on make-up and dressing up. Except for one line, there is no dialogue, only ambient noises: dripping of water, animal sounds, singing, and the percussive rhythms of the marching band's playing.

The series of short videos Similar Disguise consists of five episodes, each of which presents a character in a different time and space environment, allowing artist Tao Hui to rethink the role of “dressing” and “performing” in people’s identity and transformation. When the entire series is finished, the narrative paths that have been severed in the intervening time and space may intertwine, creating new curves. Tao Hui’s recent works are full of references and appropriations of emerging media forms. This time, he still uses the form of short social videos to create for the public, but his content is a departure from the mainstream: he takes the initiative to weaken the plot density, and instead presents the story in a poetic, weak narrative, multi-layered and multi-temporal way.