Kexin Hao is a visual artist and designer born in Beijing and based in The Netherlands. Her practice is a marriage between graphic design and performance art, and between art and non-art spaces. Using a daring visual language, Kexin’s work 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 humour and sarcasm.
The process of the research:
In my graduation work “Total Body Workout”, I investigated in the subject—nationwide physical exercise routines and mass gymnastic performances from different regimes in the last century. My research asked questions: 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? “Total Body Workout” proposes a recomposition of the existing corporal movements and a reconfiguration of the past in the present. It leads you through a ‘total body’ experience in which history unfolds not in chronological order but in a head-to-toe sequence.
In my latest research, growing out of Total Body Workout and the experiences of its performances, I started to trace ‘moving bodies’ in historical archives, and revisited my own body by looking at family footages. The research was materialized through the video essay “The Timeless Morphs: 3 Body Sessions”, in which I departed from the following questions: What is a disciplined body and what is an undisciplined one? By bringing together the personal and the collective body, and by bringing together family footages and historical archives, the essay not only observes the body in motion, but also investigates the states of being disciplined and undisciplined. This visual essay proposes our physical body as a processual, moving archive, and it aims to flesh out the importance of remembering the body as a tool of empowerment and resistance.
