Kexin Hao
She/her
Friday 12 May Audiovisual Art Assembly (AAA), Oedipus Brewing
Kexin Hao (CN, 1993) is a visual artist and designer born in Beijing and based in The Netherlands. Her practice is a marriage of design and performance. Kexin likes to challenge the boundaries between art and “non-art” space. She thinks beyond the disciplines of design, performance, game, clubbing, and fitness, which results in a rich hybridity in her art-making. Using a daring visual language, her work is a constant swing between intimate close-up on personal stories and zoom-out to collective narratives; between a past of political heaviness and a flashy modernity rendered in humor and sarcasm. In her recent practice, Kexin investigates in the themes of body, rituals, health, labor, and collective memory.
In her Talk, Kexin will dive into her performance named: Pound It!, which she made together with Rachwill Breidel and Tingyi Jiang. In short, the performance shows the pounding movements in the traditional production of sticky rice cake. The traditional movements during the performance are translated into an experimental percussion instrument and brings out a catering service and clubbing experience.
The rice-pounding utensils are self made and adapted into motion sensitive percussion instruments. Through whipping the mallet and dropping the pestle in designed rhythmic patterns, we produce alternating bass beats to electronic Caribbean music which is live composed on site. With this work, we challenge the conventions of electronic music by bringing organic and manual elements into the live composition. Rice is the central force that mutually influences all the other elements—the movement, the rhythms, the music, and the crowd.
