Hao's enigma
by Jiajia Zhang


Walking along the fjord with Hao language emerges as a third person. In form of a casual chat, single words accompany the clouds,phonetic sounds, imitating appropriated foreign languages (try Icelandic, try Swiss German), the natural tones of the environment, imagined chords and dialects of animistic objects and phantoms walk along. We head east towards a ruin, a site of worship or more likely, a former farm. Hao wanted to place some contemporary objects on the site. Erect a new structure within an existing one - but upon stepping inside the abandoned and deteriorated walls, he changes his mind. He says that the dialogue he is having with the place, his imagined juxtaposition of materials and forms are already sufficient for this work. That there is no need to have this conversation once more by executing the idea. The materials and objects that already exist there have formed such an harmony within themselves. He simply adds his own presence and some sounds. Adding things on things, objects on existing sheets, surfaces, structures, placing hands on tabletops, shoes on mattresses seem just another form of language in Hao’s work. His cooking is delicate. So is the colour range. Slicing, tossing, pressing, fishing, telegrey, ocker, pale green, lavender. Tenderness and estrangement coexist. Time matters. He said that he sometimes listens to a Mantra when he paints. But beyond all the murmur and chi, there’s giggle and excess. There is a lot of nonsense. The kind that frees up space. Space which is then again fearlessly explored. Along the trip through Iceland, he often danced like an old shaman. Or wiggled in the wind. Appeared in the smoke blown out of volcanic fields, disappeared. On the walk he said that one of the biggest mysteries in life is that one never sees oneself from the back. That one is never fully complete. And that from this incompleteness, something new arises. Sometimes, things that don’t exist are better than the ones that do.