The 10th Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art (APT10) Catalogue

Artists The 10th Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art 74 Forsaken landscapes 2018–21 Two-channel HD video: 16:9, colour, sound / Courtesy: The artist and Blindspot Gallery, Hong Kong Hao Jingban produces essayistic video installations that combine field research, archival study and live performance to explore the capacity of moving images to capture and convey memory. Her perspective is primarily concerned with Chinese histories, although this can manifest as studies of the past or changes through time, or as the politics of preserving the present moment for the future. She is strongly influenced by experimental filmmakers Chris Marker and Harun Farocki, and her works typically combine found footage and new material, accompanied by carefully considered soundtracks and self-reflexive personal narratives. Hao is best known for her Ballroom series 2012–16, which has its roots in her own parents’ participation in ballroom dancing in 1980s reform-era China and has extended to studies of various historical moments when dance has been popular in China. She has also documented factory-based work practices from the Great Leap Forward (1958–62) to the present, and the policing of domestic migration under China’s strict household registration system. Most recently, Hao has been excavating the film cultures of Manchuria and Inner Mongolia in China’s north-east, with a particular focus on the period of Japanese occupation of the region from 1932 to 1945. The artist has been constructing a series of filmic essays from documentaries, dramas and propaganda films produced during this period, as well as from later productions shot in the region. Her new works address the representation of place, shifts in cinematic cultures and technologies and artefacts of colonialism and geopolitics that, through deliberate erasure in respective Chinese and Japanese histories, remain barely accessible. The multichannel video installation Forsaken landscapes 2018–21 is the most significant work in the series Hao has produced to date. Edited from historical propaganda footage of Manchuria, as well as from such cinema classics as Masaki Kobayashi’s The Human Condition (1959) and Akira Kurosawa’s Dersu Uzala (1975), the work subtly aligns attempts to capture the vast landscape on film with the efforts of successive powers to tame the territory. The work is explicit in its aesthetic strategies, with intertitles explaining early on that in reordering and removing the intentions of the original footage, ‘the silent landscape, quietly, but decidedly, begins to speak out’. To create the work’s arresting soundtrack, Hao collaborated with Ichiro Kataoka, a practitioner of the dwindling Japanese art of benshi , or live narration for silent films. Kataoka in turn created a script based on his own research at Japan’s National Library of Congress. His melodic cadences provide a strand of poetic, if strident evocation of the vast, mythologised land depicted in the imagery. This is contrasted at times by strategic insertions of Hao’s more subdued contemporary-style Mandarin narration, reflecting on the technical challenge of photographing the region’s flat, wide plains — an endeavour that would factor in the development of Soviet widescreen technology — as an allegory for attempts to master the territory’s particularly harsh conditions. Rejected even by the Manchu people, the term Manchuria is considered taboo in China, where the region is typically referred to as simply Dongbei , or the North-east. The layering of Kataoka’s and Hao’s voices is therefore representative of deeper tensions the geography evokes; most notably the excesses of Japanese rule in the historic home of the Liao and Qing dynasties, which remains a controversial issue in Sino–Japanese relations. Such is the delicate ground on which Hao, like other young artists of her generation, conducts her historical cultural research and lets the land speak for itself. Reuben Keehan Hao Jingban Born 1985, Shanxi Province, China Lives and works in Beijing, China