Tao Hui

Tao Hui is a Chinese artist working on narrative videos. His original inspiration is the television program, which was the only entertainment in his childhood. So we can see that many dramatic plots are used in his video. As he said, he is very interested in how people perform daily, because this is people’s subconscious acting.  In 'The Acting Tutorial', he created a story that the actors  confuse reality with acting and kill a person at the end. Same as my practice, I aim to confuse the daily and theatrical performance, for example, the interviews in ' The Green Light-interview'.

 

His work' Our  joint images' invited actors to re-perform the old TV programs, like the talk shows or soap opera, and placed the original footage aside. The conversations in ‘Alice, John, Max, Sally, Jenny, and Will’ and the text in ‘Instagram’ are very dramatic and superficial. I found that there is not much difference between soap opera and real life. I heard many dramatic experiences from my friends and saw the secrets that people left for my work ‘ Keep them till you die’. It made me deeply doubt about the distance between daily behaviors and performance. When I watched his works, it is easy for me to find the connection between his works and mine, although we might base on a different background when we create art.

 

He always starts from his personal experience and the places where he has lived and grown up in. But I as a Chinese as well, it’s a bit hard for me to see the connection with my hometown and the local events that happened around me. On the contrary, the fictional world and the virtual social community shows more charm to me. So authenticity is not necessary for my work, and I would like to challenge the limits of the acceptance for the ‘truth’.