Structure Study VI (Hao Ni)

Drumming is one of the oldest forms of music, one that can be seen all across cultures from shamanic rituals to signaling devices in warfares. The act of hitting objects to make sounds is also one of the most fundamental and earliest ways of how humans understand the world around them. In Structure Study VI, three drummers are tasked with mimicking the sound of three different compilations of YouTube videos with their drums. These videos are various random situations in life where drum-like sounds are made through speed and impact, interactions between objects, animals, or naturally occurring phenomenon, such as car crash, earthquakes, factory machines operating, mining explosions, animals running, lightning and gun fights. In the end, the original videos and video recordings of the drummers’ interpretations through drums are projected side by side onto six screens, each with separate speakers to create a symphony of cacophony.

Structure Study VI is a work that processes and explores the material-oriented world we live in: a world where every little interaction between objects and living organisms becomes part of the larger vibrations that makes up the foundation of life. Also, in our time, everything that has ever happened is now constantly being uploaded and shared simultaneously and excessively on the internet, allowing each vibration to echo forever through time and space. By ritualistically returning (translating) all these video recordings on YouTube back into one of the most primitive ways of human sound making, like a type of somatic data processors, the world becomes music again.

Drummers: John Stephenson, Watanabe Hiroto and Yi-Fang Lee

Hao Ni (b. 1989, Hsinchu city, Taiwan) 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 sculpture, installation, video and sound performance that explores the continuously changing power systems and structures that control the world and our daily existence within them.

Hao 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; and the Queens Museum, New York. His recent solo exhibitions include Ambush at the Taipei Fine Arts Museum, Siege at T293 in Rome, and Trust me Love me at Gallery Vacancy in Shanghai. Hao Ni’s Structure Study V was exhibited in Aujourd’hui aura lieu at the Gwangju Biennale Pavilion Project, 2018. In 2019, Hao Ni’s Structure Study I was acquired by MMCA Seoul (National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, South Korea) and will be included in its upcoming exhibition in 2020.
https://haoni.art/