Mao Haonan (茅昊楠) works with computer animated video to create works that combine subtle social commentary with layered philosophical and religious symbolism.
Read MoreMao's evolving methodology has taken a range of forms. His earlier works made more direct use of pre-existing online systems. Manifeste? (2016), for example, is based on a repeated translation of Hugo Ball's 1916 Dada Manifesto 90 times over, using the 90 languages available on Google Translate at that time. The cumulative imperfections and discrepancies within the translations resulted in a text so altered as to become abstract. The irony of using such a text—whose original content was a direct attack on the accepted meanings of words and the role of language—is clear; the work acts out that self-same message, finally fulfilling its prophecy.
Rather than words, Mao's 3D digital animation Secondary Rainbow (2016) examines symbols. Talking about the work with the French digital arts festival The Open Window, where it was exhibited in 2017, Mao describes the importance of 'symbolic architecture', loaded as it is with cultural and political symbolism. 'These are elements of identities', each element in the work representing a country, civilisation, region or religion.
Rather than the impacts of religious doctrine, Mao explores the experience of the individual and a more existential set of themes in the ongoing, four-part series of digital works called 'Memory Blocks'. The series follows a digitally rendered protagonist who portrays a different character in each of the videos: a soldier, an artist, a doubting scientist, and a refugee who has lost his homeland. One part of the series, titled Action, Almost Unable to Think (2018), is a multi-channel 3D video installation that centres on the expanded instant of a soldier's violent death in an explosion as he is greeting a civilian. Fire is a recurring motif in the video. Like writer Jorge Luis Borges, Mao slows the moment down in order to fully explore the central character's emotional and psychological landscape. He invokes tragedy and absurdity in the title, which was inspired by a description of the conqueror in Albert Camus' 1942 book The Myth of Sisyphus: 'don't assume that because I love action I have had to forget how to think.'
Mao lives and works in Shanghai and Nantes.
Matthew Crooks | Ocula | 2018
