HU QINGHAI

One interpretation of The Long Now is that these works are slices of Hu Qingtai’s day-to-day life, scattered across the span of a long time. These works are neither rooted in distant fantasies nor fundamentally different from the lives of ordinary people. This draws our attention to the fact that Hu Qingtai’s artistic practice is inseparable from and originates in his life. His art does not stand above reality, nor is society an object of his research. Rather, his works are residues of his social encounters with others. They resemble traces left behind by the workings of a social machine—the marks of what he has actively or passively endured, maneuvered through, negotiated and compromised with in reality.

In this project, we trace partial fragments of the artist’s life. They include a box of burned works (diaries); paintings given as gifts to doctors (diaries); agreements concerning a socially mediated scheme to acquire another’s art project; fabric purchased from bankrupt factories; observations on everyday life and the work of customer service workers; unsold e-commerce inventory; and window frames cut from shuttered businesses in the Xianghe area, as featured in his solo exhibition in Beijing. These objects come from Hu Qingtai’s life, while also containing the common behavioral patterns and structures of feeling shared by countless people living in this era.