Zhou Tao

The blue glow of LED-screens lights up the people’s faces in Zhou Tao’s Blue and Red. We cannot see what they’re looking at, only their reactions to it. At a square in Guangzhou, modern technology meets a public that is both so human and perpetually conditioned. At the squares in Bangkok, protesters meet the riot police. But we don’t see the protesters, so much as the silence that surrounds them. Waiting, resting, the tents that people live in temporarily. A massage given to a tired back. And then, suddenly, blood.

We then see the red soil of a mining district in the countryside. White bags become a kind of human presence amidst the desolation. Tao’s work is a poetic contemplation without text or explanatory voiceover. The people are smaller than their surroundings, filmed from above, somehow superfluous. They are lit up and through by a harsh light that push into their homes, tents and faces. The private and the public coincide in such a trivial way that is, nonetheless, unusual to see depicted. The encounter of urban and rural settings is typical of Tao’s work. Here, the territory is both an economic resource and a shared point of access. It is what we all stand on, but does that make it a sufficient foundation for solidarity between us?

Zhou Tao (b. 1976) is an artist based in Guangzhou.

Thanks to gallery Vitamin Creative Space.

Work

Blue and Red, 2014

Location

Kiruna konstgille, Kiruna
1.11.2018–17.2.2018