Ni Hao

Ni Hao received a BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2011 and an MFA from Rhode Island School of Design in 2014. Originally trained as a sculptor, Ni’s work often combines sculptures, installations, videos and sound performances that explore the continuously changing power systems and structures in the world and our daily existence within them.

Ni’s work has been featured in exhibitions at places like Rockland Center for the Arts, West Nyack; Boston Center for the Arts, Boston; 18th Street Arts Center, Los Angeles; Taipei Fine Arts Museum, Taipei; New Bedford Art Museum, New Bedford; Queens Museum, New York; and MOCA Taipei. His most recent solo exhibitions took place at the Taipei Fine Arts Museum, T293 in Rome, and Vacancy Gallery in Shanghai in 2019. Ni Hao’s Structure Study V was exhibited at the Gwangju Biennale Pavilion Project, 2018. More recently, his work was included in The Eighth Huayu Youth Award exhibition at UCCA Beijing.

Like a poltergeist, Ni communicates through objects in playful ways. By breaking something and putting it back together in different ways, he is able to reveal different aspects of the same object that are otherwise invisible. Other times Ni creates work through the process of mimicry, by hijacking and imitating different making techniques of all kinds of objects, he is able to create artworks that speak through the specific culture and tradition behind those objects. In his practice, Ni is constantly trying to create a space of chaos by overlapping a wide range of subject matters such as geopolitics, environmental issues, sociology, dromology, internet cultures and ghost stories. During the collision of different phenomena in that space of chaos, new ideas are born and finally expressed through a suitable artistic medium.