Ni Hao
Liste Year
Year of Birth
Country of Birth
Presented by
2022
1989
Taiwan
Gallery Vacancy
Ni Hao, born in Hsin Chu, Taiwan in 1989, now lives and works in Hsin Chu and New York. He received a BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2011 and an MFA from the Rhode Island School of Design in 2014. Recent solo exhibitions include: Trust Me, Love Me, Gallery Vacancy, Shanghai, 2019; Siege, T293, Rome, 2019; Ambush, Taipei Fine Arts Museum, Taipei, 2019. Works by the artist are included in the collections of VMAC in Hong Kong, MMCA (National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art) in Seoul, South Korea and Collezione Taurisano in Naples, Italy.
Ni Hao’s works scrutinize bodily rituals popularized under capitalist consumerism. In Grid XV, he merges the handmade scented soap with mass-produced IKEA drying racks, colliding an amorphous organic substance with a standardized industrial object. As a quintessential household object, the soap in Ni’s work serves not only as a metaphorical extension of the living entity but also a device of affirmation of the body’s livelihood. Compressed, molded, and shaped by an external structure, the portrayed state of soap alludes to various oblivious structures and systems created by human beings to regulate the body, catering to the capitalist agenda of sufficiency and productivity. Scrubbed, scraped, and dissolved, the soap and the body hold a curious relationship in which each scrupulous interaction purported by hygiene seems to be at the cost of our living environment. Underneath the pristine outlook of the sculpture, the artist oftentimes conceals a layer of self-inflicting violence that is perpetual and pervasive in our daily lives.
By utilizing various mediums such as sculpture and video, Ni Hao investigates power structure, consumerism, and violence aesthetics in his multidisciplinary practice.
In Ni Hao’s exhibitions, he often includes sound performances to be exhibited alongside sculptures. When sound interacts with our auditory perception, it occupies a physical space very much like sculptures. Sound has the ability to be interwoven into the space with everything in it to create theatrical experiences, and to generate a movement that animates inanimate objects in ways that other mediums can’t. Moreover, the music itself is definitely a very sculptural discipline, as the fundamental of sound is the vibration of objects, whether flute, drum, strings, bells, or even the human ability to sin ...
In this project, the shirts directly communicate and activate the static Grid series on the wall, by performing the idea of the bodies under the impact of the invisible systems and structures that dictate our lives within the domestic setting. Some shirts are flattened and slumped over, tossed on the ground, while others are erected, possessed, and full in their presence. Peripherally they appear human-like and animal-like, doing various gestures and occupying various corners inside the booth, but in reality, they are hollow shells consisting of Vietnamese or Chinese mass-produced shirts dip ...
