Pace Beijing presents comprehensive retrospective of Chinese artist Hong Hao’s works

BEIJING.- Pace Beijing is presenting the solo exhibition of Hong Hao, the renowned contemporary Chinese artist who is newly represented by Pace. The exhibition is a comprehensively retrospective of the artist’s works from various periods of his career, as well as new works. This exhibition is the first public show of his 2013 series Reciprocating since Hong Hao’s solo exhibition As It Is in 2011.

Hong Hao questions and criticizes the survival in reality in his unique satire and parody style, and he also discusses aesthetics by using a highly representative language, which is based on his talent of using various media and his creational methods with oriental origins. The exhibition will last until 27 April.

The new series Reciprocating extends from Hong Hao’s previous concept of making art by scanning, which preserves the original shape of the material. After procedures such as collecting, limning, scanning and painting after print, Hong Hao’s artwork breaks the traditional rules of production and techniques, and also passes the boundary of media. Besides, after removing from the functional and commercial impact which comes from public opinions in a logic way, his artwork returns to the thinking of pure aesthetics, and blur the physical form of certain objects but focus on the archetype. Hong Hao’s work shows both the spatial relationship between different objects after dematerialization and the artist’s will, which returns to the very early stage that is pure and simple after experiencing the reality, but obtaining more wisdom than the very beginning that is refined from the experience.

My Things-Book-keeping of 2004-05A 165 x 270, 2006

Videos are included in the exhibition, including Taichi, a recording of the process that the artist practices Taichi every day. Shot from different perspective, it conveys the awareness of the relationship between the human being and his surroundings, and through the self-reflection over survival and daily maintaining, to represent the implications of achieving the ultimate truth via invisible presence.

The exhibition also includes the past important works of Hong Hao, which reflects the featured characteristics of the artist. Hong Hao has very deep understanding of the process of experience. In his late 80s work Selected Scriptures, Hong Hao made screen printing in the form of antique books. He rearranged the existing territory of different nations by containing languages and marks of social consuming as well as public commercial media to eliminate the clash between different cultures and merge the worldwide culture and history.

The series of Elegant Gathering (2007) is the irony representation of the public place where audience tends to talk with others instead of appreciating art. The artwork also shows that the artist imposes his bold humor onto the ruthless analysis of the art world, especially the position of an individual in a self-inferential and narcissistic world.Hong Hao used to study history and antique books in the 1990s. From 1997, he began taking photographs that are irony and self-reflecting.

In 2001 Hong Hao began the series of My Things in which he displayed his objects after scanning them, to show his living situation through daily consumption. He has discovered a universal space among arrangement, transformation and repentance when displaying his objects. The arrangement is a very complex combination that enforces the impression of the survival and rhythm of life in the reality, and transforms the living situation and the desire of consuming in contemporary China into graphics. In his 2008 series Bottom, Hong Hao scanned his objects in various angles. Therefore, the final look of this series is following the natural trend rather than in a pre-set situation. In another work, Hong Hao collected many red header documents and food tickets to create a collage that comment on the sense of authority among hierarchy in Chinese cultural context to show the relationship of humanity in people’s daily life.

Best-known for his print and photography works, Hong Hao (b. 1965, Beijing, China) graduated from the Printmaking Department of the Central Academy of Fine Arts, Beijing in 1989.The artist currently lives and works in Beijing.

Much of Hong Hao’s work features assembled scanned images of various found objects including maps, books, tickets, receipts, banknotes, food, and containers. In his 2009 solo exhibition “Hong Hao: Bottom” at Beijing Commune, the artist exhibited a series that features the bottom half of everyday objects. By arranging the scanned images according to their forms and colors, he destructs the functional property of the materials and reproduces an undifferentiated, flattened, deliberately superficial world of aesthetics. While Hong Hao continues to work with found objects, ”AS IT IS,” his recent solo exhibition at Beijing Commune, deals with the physical forms in a more straightforward manner, creating an interesting dialectic development of both the vocabulary and concept of his art.

Hong Hao’s work has been exhibited widely since the 1990s, including solo exhibitions at Chambers Fine Art, New York (2004 and 2007) and Rencontres d’Arles, Arles, France (2003). He has also participated in international group exhibitions such as “Between Here and There: Passages in Contemporary Photography” at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (2010); “Book/Shelf” at the Museum of Modern Art, New York (2008); and “Zooming into Focus: Contemporary Chinese Photography and Video”, shown at the San Diego Museum of Art, USA, Shanghai Art Museum, and the National Art Museum of China (2004-2005). Work by Hong Hao was also recently included in the group show “The Global Contemporary: Art Worlds after 1989” at ZKM (Museum of Contenporary Art) in Karlsruhe, Germany.Hong Hao’s work is included in numerous public collections including the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the British Museum; Museum Of Fine Arts, Boston; the Fukuoka Asian Art Museum, Japan; the J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles; and the Ullens Center for Contemporary Art, Beijing, among others.

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