Kexin Hao

Lungs, kidneys, liver, stomach, and intestines fill the seven niches in the corridor. Inspired by anatomical illustrations and organisational diagrams, the work explores the overlap between organisms and organisations. Enlarged hand-drawn organs merge stony façade with fleshy interior, transforming the museum’s historic staircase into a human body. The organs become metaphors for institutional systems of filtration, regulation and legitimation, while common disorders like reflux, gallstones, and constipation become forms of resistance and dissent. What belongs to the body and what is treated as foreign? Is the system external, or are we part of it?

Lungs, kidneys, liver, stomach, and intestines fill the seven niches in the corridor. Inspired by anatomical illustrations and organisational diagrams, the work explores the overlap between organisms and organisations. Enlarged hand-drawn organs merge stony façade with fleshy interior, transforming the museum’s historic staircase into a human body. The organs become metaphors for institutional systems of filtration, regulation and legitimation, while common disorders like reflux, gallstones, and constipation become forms of resistance and dissent. What belongs to the body and what is treated as foreign? Is the system external, or are we part of it?

Revolution Is a Dinner Party is a hand puppet performance combining singing and spoken word that reimagines Mao Zedong’s phrase, “Revolution is not a dinner party,” as an invitation to reflect on food, pests, and kinship. The play stages an afterlife dialogue between a sparrow and a rat—each a puppet on one of the performer’s hands. Drawing from Mao’s “Smash Sparrows” campaign and the French “Great Hanoi Rat Massacre,” the two debate class conflicts and historical injustice, revealing how human and vermin are entangled in political violence and colonial sanitation efforts. Their conflict is interrupted by a silverfish deity—embodied by the performer’s head and torso—who reveals that all three characters are parts of one body: the sparrow as the world’s mouth, feeding on seeds; the rat as the gut, digesting the city's waste. She guides them not to heaven, but to a dinner party, reimagining revolution as an act of eating, where boundaries between self and other dissolve, and bodies extend into the world through food, waste, and decay. The performance unfolds in a hand-painted puppet theatre stage on which guts, flowers, mouths, sewers, and sexual organs intertwine—evoking the porous, unruly nature of bodies and echoing the play’s theme on inter-species intimacy.

Revolution Is a Dinner Party is a hand puppet performance combining singing and spoken word that reimagines Mao Zedong’s phrase, “Revolution is not a dinner party,” as an invitation to reflect on food, pests, and kinship. The play stages an afterlife dialogue between a sparrow and a rat—each a puppet on one of the performer’s hands. Drawing from Mao’s “Smash Sparrows” campaign and the French “Great Hanoi Rat Massacre,” the two debate class conflicts and historical injustice, revealing how human and vermin are entangled in political violence and colonial sanitation efforts. Their conflict is interrupted by a silverfish deity—embodied by the performer’s head and torso—who reveals that all three characters are parts of one body: the sparrow as the world’s mouth, feeding on seeds; the rat as the gut, digesting the city's waste. She guides them not to heaven, but to a dinner party, reimagining revolution as an act of eating, where boundaries between self and other dissolve, and bodies extend into the world through food, waste, and decay. The performance unfolds in a hand-painted puppet theatre stage on which guts, flowers, mouths, sewers, and sexual organs intertwine—evoking the porous, unruly nature of bodies and echoing the play’s theme on inter-species intimacy.

She chews, crunches, slurps, screams, sings, whispers, and moans…. Through an erotic, sensual, and visceral listening experience of compost plated on a banquet table, Kexin Hao unfolds intimate relationships and proximities between our bodies and the discarded residues of what we eat. Borrowing from ASMR mukbang—a genre of online eating show in which a host consumes food and amplifies the sounds of eating and drinking to trigger a viewer’s autonomous sensory meridian response—Hao immerses visitors in a four-course meal and guides them into a world where guts morph into worms and tongues fondle soil. Titled Lewd Bouquet, here the human digestive system, culinary routines, and sexual rituals intermingle with decomposing processes and compost organisms. The aural feast culminates in a toast: “Canon of Filth,” a song composed by Hao where haunting waves of melodies imitate, follow, and delay one another. As staggered voices harmonize over one another, the canon begins to resemble layers of compost and the synchronization between our intestinal and the extrinsic realms. Touring in rounds of dissonance, it celebrates the unwholesome and brings us ever closer to the dead, the rotten, and the underground, where we make life, where we make love.

performance at AMAZE Berlin

performance at LowLands Festival

performance at LowLands Festival

The research focuses on bats (in the coronavirus crisis) and sparrows (in the “eradicate 4 pests” hygiene campaign in China’s Great Leap Forward) as carriers of symbolism and materials for personification in relation to political narratives in national health agenda, and how it reflects our understanding of ecology and immunity. The outcome is a performance combining music, spoken words, singing (rap) and movements encrypting the research outcomes and using human bodies as sites for metaphors to reenact the bodies of bats. Once a villainized creature, this bat has become a role model, a pop star, and a spokesman of our ecological and political emergencies. In the post-Covidian times when we have moved on from the pandemic, we should still think about the conflicts the pandemic had directed us to and left us in: conflicts between nation state and people; between countries; and between ideologies. Certain narratives are created to serve people’s need for an enemy. In this work, through embodying bats and sparrows, I found a good entry to the political engagement as an artist and researcher. These species provide materials to understand the causes, potentials, dangers, and damages of the hero-villain narratives. And they are the new materials which host resistance of a divided society and the lurking autocracy. The body of the bat, the place embedding so much about liminality, is where we find resolutions to the increasingly polarised world.

performance at Het Huis Utrecht

“Forceful Catering” is a choreographic and musical performance growing out from the East/Southeast Asian tradition of preparing sticky rice cakes (mochi). The rice pounding utensils become experimental percussion instruments to produce bass beats to the electronic music; the pounding movements develop along the increasing viscosity of the rice. Inspired by the traditional Chinese folklores and rice pounding work songs, this project tries to expand the rice pounding song to contain new narratives reflecting our current urgencies: can a woman’s body become, contrary to a recipient, a giver of forces and penetration? What if fierce acts don’t direct to violence and harm, but a process leading to nourishment and care? How does the transformation of rice translate the cycle and entanglement of birth and death, fertility and decay? The performance brings out a clubbing experience and a catering service to the audience. “Forceful Catering” thrives on feeding the ones who treasure beats and intimacy.

performance at iii The Hague

Home pests have inhabited a human house. Browsing through the interior catalogue, they imagine a house of their own.

It was my pleasure to design the “Chinees-Indische Restaurant Stickeralbum”, a project of Benjamin Li about his ethnographic research on Chinees-Indisch restaurants in the Netherlands, its development and disappearance, entangled with his personal history and family archive. Having worked on this project for one year and half, I was not only touched by Benjamin’s love, nostalgia, and passion on the topic, but also his daring approach gluing the societal with the personal, the persistence and dedication in his methodology, and eventually the playfulness in the artistic presentation. With “Chinees-Indische Restaurant Stickeralbum”, you can browse through Benjamin’s family archive, read about his research and thoughts, collect, exchange, and play with the stickers that contain a unique selection of the dishes he photographed from over 1200 Chinees-Indische restaurants he visited throughout the years.

performance at Traumburg Festival

Through the research on work songs in which singing/chanting helps choreograph the repetitive manual labour, the artist tries to trace out how our moving bodies used to cooperate in the extinct activities of production. From here she questions: how do we preserve the body movements and restore our moving bodies as the living archives? Can we restore it on this body of you and me, now and here? Future Dance of Nostalgia is a dancing game which invites audience to perform the choreography that extracts and abstracts the movements found in the pre-industrial, heavy physical labour, and work songs. Motion tracking technology allows the body movements to be quantified, measured, and evaluated. Historical archives of work songs provide the inspiration for the music that renders the old tales and melodies into clubbing beats that lead the dance. Through ethnographic research into work songs and the moving body, the project draws much needed attention to alternative historical archives of our times. The gaming technology, visual, and music, bring people closer to the past through a tangible and modern experience. The work also brings fun and togetherness to audience through public participatory dance sessions and interactive gameplay.

game installation at Proximity Music, Rewire Festival, The Hague

performance at Vondelpark, Amsterdam

performance at W139 Amsterdam

Total Body Workout leads you through a ‘total body’ experience in which history unfolds not in chronological order but in a head-to-toe sequence. 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? Based on nationwide physical exercise routines and mass gymnastic performances in Asia, the Eastern Bloc and the United States, Total Body Workout proposes a recomposition of the existing corporal movements and a reconfiguration of the past in the present. Here and now, we work out the total body.

Publication containing image research and texts about "Total Body Workout".

performance at Graduation Show KABK

performance at PIP Expo The Hague

performance at PIP Expo The Hague

World Fusion Food Foundry is an invented playground where the artist experiments how food can be an overloaded signifier, a carrier of politics and cultural identities. In the series of performances, the artist tries to combine provocative politician’s language with the act of giving cooking shows, thus to examine the possibility of extracting and isolating rhetorics from action. Growing up in the capital city of China, she has studied the common language of political speeches in schools and the media. There is a mixture of both rejection and fascination to this grandiosity, revolutionist passion and the early communist mania. This work is not merely a satire of such a type of language, but is also about the artist’s attempt to resolve her relationship with this cultural specific rhetorics.

“fixxxion TV” is a disturbing, bombastic, grandiose, gamblingling and 100% virus-infected campaign website for 2020 election. ⁣

Royal Nail Salon is an on-going project about giving manicure service as an artistic expression and practice. It was initiated on 1st April, 2019, when I hosted a half-day manicure workshop in the art academy. All materials are free to use. The only rule is to only paint nails and choose colours for the other person. Being neither a self-service nor a staff-client service, the nail salon workshop aimed to explore the possibilities of interactions happening in a get-together spot. The idea of Royal Nail Salon is to bring the”non-art”, the “mundane” and “service” to art spaces or the academic context. It is an attempt to break boundaries and to provide a platform for queerness, bodily intimacy, and alternative storytelling.

"Yes sir, I can boogie." — a 80s hit disco song by a Spanish female duo Baccara got viral in Europe back in the days. While showing a woman's perspective in the song, the single is written by Frank Dostal and Rolf Soja, and produced by Soja — who are all MEN. Before the production of the song and the fame, the duo were spotted by Leon Deane, the record company's manager — who is also MAN. And in those video clips of live performance, you will see that MEN are the major audience and the ones that enjoy the song. This illustrates the female role in the music(and a lot more) industry — being qualified, designed and sold — as a doll in a package. And the money goes to men. Two ladies were dressed up, twisting their bodies stiffly on the stage — you wonder if they enjoyed themselves, maybe it's a yes. But who ever cared? Who ever asked them? I re-performed this song and would like to show the women's reversed role: being the initiative, and the agency itself: being able to design the stage and choose my audience. Being sexy, because I want to, not from someone else's force. Being loud: Yes sir, I can boogie. Because I want to say so, not because you ever want to hear that.