The Legend of Hao Guo - Rosemary Forde

Hao Guo will leave Melbourne for China in a few months, but I don’t think we’ll forget him so soon. A young Beijing man, Hao has spent much of his twenties in Melbourne studying and making art. Not trusting any definition that delimits what constitutes art, Hao has approached almost everything in his life and world as potential subject matter — getting his hair cut by a friend, or mastering the Rubik’s Cube (sure, only after cheating with online instructions).

For art materials he has used almost anything that is cheap or readily available — phone books, friends, art school rubbish, his own body. In a performance piece Hao awarded the 2001 terrorist attacks on New York’s World Trade Center as the greatest artwork of all time. In another he ate an egg that hadn’t quite cooked under a desk lamp. Like a kid, he made water bombs with condoms. And for years he made copious amounts of penis art — digital, sculptural and performance art renderings of his own, or other, dicks.

It was cool but I’m glad he’s moved on from the dick art (though not completely). I always wondered what else he wanted to say or talk about. In this, his farewell exhibition, Hao wants to talk about life, death, the world and himself. On all counts he seems unsure. Believe, Believe? Hao Guo doesn’t believe anything. But this is perhaps the only intelligent position to take. Between the video loop Baby Birth and D.I.Y. Coffin, a work suspended in a darkened room of the gallery, there are myths, cheap tricks, blatant distortions, jokes, labour and snippets of science. There are also friends (contributing and performing at the opening), effort and patience. There is no blind faith, but ITISHAPPENING suggests just the scarcest amount of acceptance necessary to get by as a cynic and sceptic.

Hao says that he is careful to apply very low standards to the world, trying to avoid disappointment. In his work he always looks for the cheapest and simplest means — a bare minimum efficiency. He also incorporates accidents, and displays his tools, materials and initial experiments within the gallery, humbly showing us all it took to make the ’finished‘ works. This respect for all the contributing components and labour is demonstrated in real time in Phonebook. A video shows Hao piecing the work together, fusing two phone books page by page over several hours. The labour becomes rhythmic and unconscious but the layering is imperfect; each consecutive page reaches slightly further from the spine resulting in a final pairing that is a little mismatched but so hard to separate. Later the phone books will be tediously peeled apart, but someone else will do this work, undoing Hao’s attempt to solidify the two.

Like many of Hao’s works, we’re not sure if this is a tragedy or a comedy. Watching Baby Birth we are disgusted by the up-close grotesquerie of what should be a sacred moment of human life. The baby’s head protrudes from its mother’s body, screaming, grasped by a rubber-gloved hand, it is pushed back in again in an endless loop of violently suspended and indecisive obtrusion and retraction. What kind of arrival is this? It depends on your point of view.

This suspension of movement and confused positioning is also present in Fall, a digital animation of the artist’s body rotating endlessly in space. The tight perspective creates strange exaggerations of an otherwise perfectly rendered body.

Just as Hao’s interpretations of the individual are based on revealing distortions of perspective, unstable foundations and uncertainty, so too are his observations of the world and its organisation. Hao Guo doesn’t believe anything. But he keeps asking the right questions, despite the possibility he may never find acceptable answers.
 
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