| Tao Aimin doesn’t put on any airs. She’s a down-home country girl from rural Hunan who is refreshingly unpretentious. At first glance, you wouldn’t guess that beneath the unaffected modesty and simple straightforwardness of her demeanor lies an incisive artistic vision and a staunch commitment to making art that touches the lives of ordinary folks. "Coming from a little village makes me pretty different from most of the artists in the scene," she says smiling with her kooky charm and confidence. "In all the Beijing scene, I’ve only met one other artist who comes from a truly rural background." And why should this matter? |  |
Tao Aimin’s Anthropological Art – Luna Fenichel
Tao Aimin doesn’t put on any airs. She’s a down-home country girl from rural Hunan who is refreshingly unpretentious. At first glance, you wouldn’t guess that beneath the unaffected modesty and simple straightforwardness of her demeanor lies an incisive artistic vision and a staunch commitment to making art that touches the lives of ordinary folks.
"Coming from a little village makes me pretty different from most of the artists in the scene," she says smiling with her kooky charm and confidence. "In all the Beijing scene, I’ve only met one other artist who comes from a truly rural background."
And why should this matter? In no small part, this is because the majority of China’s population is still rural and the great "Chinese dream" has not yet arrived in the countryside. Save the teasing exceptions of "rags-to-riches bumpkins," or "baofahu," most rural Chinese are still struggling to make it in an increasingly confusing world. Tao Aimin’s installations and oil painting captures the poignancy of this predicament. Far from an over-romanticization or the wank-the-pathos-fest that characterizes much of the rural subject matter in commercial Chinese oil painting, Tao Aimin’s work unflinchingly confronts the harshness and monotony of rural labor without turning her subjects into objects of aestheticized pity.
Using installation combined with oil painting and video, Tao Aimin bears witness to the lives of the rural poor. Focusing on women in particular, she creates art with an anthropological side to compliment and enlarge the aesthetic. In River of Women and Book of Women, she uses wooden washboards to create moving and thought-provoking installations—monuments to the daily lives and grinding labor of rural women.
"I went to villages all around the countryside outside Beijing collecting washboards. I explained to the women there that I wanted to incorporate their labor into my work as a way of acknowledging and respecting it. I listened to them tell me about their lives." The artist’s playful expression disappears as she narrates the intense process of creating her latest works.
Both pieces employ over 60 such washboards as a tribute to the way in which repetitive manual labor marks the passage of life for the rural poor. In River of Women, Tao Aimin hangs boards under lights, fashioning a metaphorical river. Onto each washboard, she has painted the faces of each board’s owner, whose lined, sun-weathered expressions iconically resemble the age-worn ruts of the washboards themselves. In the background, the sound of a washing machine cycles repeatedly, as if to ask what the status of such women will be in the age of modernization. Book of Women uses such labor-worn washboards to form an ironic book constructed in the ancient style of calligraphy scrolls made from bamboo tiles in order to underscore the ways in which ordinary women’s cultural contributions have historically been circumvented by a lifetime of labor.
"I was touched by the gifts these women gave me," Tao Aimin relates. "These boards are marked by the passage of their lives."
