Kexin Hao

artistiek onderzoek - audiovisueel - design - media - performance

Kexin Hao (CN, 1993) is a visual artist and designer born in Beijing and based in The Netherlands. Her practice is a marriage of graphic design and performance art. Having initiated and being involved in various creative projects across China and Europe, Kexin challenges not only the geometrical borders, but also the boundaries between art and non-art space. She thinks beyond the disciplines of design, film, performance, game, and music, which results in rich hybridity in her art-making. Using a daring visual language, Kexin's works 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, archive, and collective memory. Kexin received granted residencies at iii (instrument inventors initiative) and V2_. She has shown her works at Rewire festival, TEC ART, GOGBOT Festival, LEV Festival(ES), and places such as MAM

Kexin Hao “Total Body Workout” - Total Body Workout leads you through a ‘total body’ experience in which history unfolds not in chronological order but in a head-to-toe sequence. How is our body scripted and shaped by the times it lives in? How are national agendas and political ideologies woven into bodily semiotics? How does one’s body memory become an integral part of hegemonic historical narratives? And how do we inhabit a historical and totalised body? Based on nationwide physical exercise routines and mass gymnastic performances in Asia, the Eastern Bloc and the United States, Total Body Workout proposes a recomposition of the existing corporal movements and a reconfiguration of the past in the present. Here and now, we work out the total body.