Hao Jingban: New Directions

The Ullens Center for Contemporary Art (UCCA) presents “New Directions: Hao Jingban,” an exhibition featuring the artist’s recent video works: An Afternoon Ball, I Can’t Dance, and How were you doing there? Here, the artist turns the lens towards two seemingly disparate spaces, ballrooms and factories, key sites of entertainment, sociality, and production in the twentieth century. Influenced by directors Chris Marker, Harun Farocki, and others, Hao Jingban’s work often uses the language and structure of documentary film to explore the fate of the general population in relation to social movements and the currents of history. Through field research, scenic reconstruction, and narrative montage, her artworks act as historical documents as they explore the fraught relationships between memory and image, event and narrative. Hao Jingban captures, with great sensitivity, situations and behaviors that can stand in as the symbols of an era.
Since 2012, Hao Jingban has been working on the project Beijing Ballrooms, which includes both I Can’t Dance and An Afternoon Ball. Arriving in China during the Republican Era, ballroom dance enjoyed a brief vogue among the Beijing elite at the dawn of the People’s Republic, fell from favor during the decades that followed and was finally resurrected in public parks and plazas after the Reform and Opening. The vicissitudes of ballroom dance not only relate the plight of a generation, they also betray a logic peculiar to Chinese history. An Afternoon Ball observes and documents a deteriorating ballroom, reproducing an ordinary dance while attempting to present the abstract spatial relations—visual and psychological—constituted by the people occupying it. I Can’t Dance creates a four channel video installation where documentary images, classic movie clips, and texts on the evolution of Beijing’s ballroom scene coalesce in a polyphonic dialogue exposing new historical narratives. Here interviews with veteran dancers are interwoven with excerpts from Song of Youth and Intrepid Hero, films from the 1950s, placing the independent “oral histories” in a holistic intertextuality while deconstructing images of the ideological imaginary.
As the first part of another ongoing project, How were you doing there? employs the realism of direct observation to a once booming industrial landscape now giving way to entropy. During the creative process, Hao Jingban visited the steel and copper factories where her parents and grandparents once worked. Claiming to follow the “cinematic logic of labor”, she depicts the production methods of workers through direct language, aiming to showcase actual labor. Architectural remnants of Soviet provenance, deserted buildings, natural landscapes around the copper mine, and nostalgic glimpses of machinery and other objects are combined with images of labor, placing the latter within in a wider temporal and spatial framework. The artist has also interviewed family members that once worked or are still working in the steel and copper factories. Independent from the film, viewers may use external headphones to listen to a monologue produced by the artist in response to her family members’ stories, adding another layer to the overall narrative. Through the use of long and fixed lens shots and a restrained editing style, Hao Jingban endows her works with a “neutral” temperament supplemented by written texts. From a personal perspective, the involvement of these family interviews re-examines the historical features within the landscape of China’s industrialization.
For Hao Jingban, the filmic image is not merely a form of expression but also a research method reflecting history and reality. Her artworks act as historical documents as they provide new ways or approaches to understanding and penetrating reality through the reconstruction of imaged sites.