Kexin Hao is a visual artist and designer born in Beijing and based in the Hague. She graduated with distinction in graphic design bachelor from Royal Academy of Art The Hague. Kexin’s practice is a marriage of graphic design and performance/public engaging art. Having initiated and been involved in various creative projects across China and Europe, Kexin challenges not only geometrical borders but also disciplines of design, film, performance, and music, as well as physical boundaries between art and non-art space. Using a daring visual language, the 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 humour and sarcasm. In her recent works, Kexin investigates the themes of body, rituals, health, collective memory, and retro-futurism.

iii has commissioned a new work for Kexin Hao’s residency, ‘Future Dance of Nostalgia’, which explores ancient human activities of production in the form of an interactive dance game and as an investigation into the human body as an archive.

“ Our written history places the steam engine on the altar instead of the bodies operating the steam engine. I argue that history is more than that. Can the moving body—instead of the machines—be the centre point of history?

This research raises a further question: if our body is the archive, how do we preserve it? How do we pass it on? In the age of AI and robots, the physical human is engaging way less in production and manufacturing, and the body movements are forgotten. We might know how to pedal the gym exerciser, but no longer remember how to pedal the sewing machine. How can we preserve the memory of the bodies that we used to inhabit by means of entertainment? Can we challenge the notion of hard labor, by ritualising and re-scripting it into leisure? 

I would like to look at these disappearing activities that are soon to be totally replaced by technologies and robots, with a retro-futuristic perspective, as well as a non-linear timeline: to jump to the future to look at the past. I would like to imagine a future where people feel nostalgic for the ancient manner of labor, and they invent dance movements that mimic the manner, yet totally detach the meaning from it. “

Kexin Hao will develop ‘Future Dance of Nostalgia’ at iii workspace from February 10 to April 10 2022.

iii’s residency program is made possible through the support of Creative Industries Fund NL and the Creative Europe program of the European Union.