Hong Hao

Pace Gallery is pleased to present a new solo exhibition dedicated to Beijing based artist Hong Hao. This exhibition brings together works from two decades of the artist’s career, highlighting his most renowned series along with prints, photography, and works on canvas. As one of the key figures in the development of Chinese contemporary art, Hong Hao has observed modern society through keen artistic intuition. His artistic explorations have been closely connected to the shifting value systems of present-day society and how to express these social changes in his work.

Since 2001, Hong Hao has been building his contemporary visual archive, reflecting on society with the series My Things. In this body of work, the artist recorded each day for twelve years through the objects around him and indiscriminately began to scan and categorize them. Through this process, he decouples the objects from the system of value attached to them. Distinguishing the difference between a photograph and a scan, the artist hoards and selects objects and aims to obliterate the distance between human and objects, as well as between objects and machines. Hong Hao removes the space between the object and lens as with a camera by scanning items. A scanner reveals the reverse side of what we see; moreover, it visually flattens the objects, just like the way traditional Chinese rubbings are made from the carvings of craftsmen on stone and bronze objects. The artist believes scanning to be the most rigid approach to reveal the real size of an object.