South of the Mountains

A data center in the mountainous southwestern province of Guizhou is at the heart of his newest work, presented through a panoramic sweep around the facility’s surrounding rural farmland. In a play of contrasts, the camera drifts across blades of grass, meeting local farmers, tourists, and animals along the way, all to a joined hum of whirling hard drives and chirping insects.

In the scorching heat of the Gobi Desert, an infrastructure project unfolds in the unforgiving natural environment. An endeavor so immense in scale that the individuals navigating through it appear minuscule in comparison.

In a playful critique of the mechanisation of the body and the militarisation of the workplace, Zhou Tao collages choreographed chants that take place in morning group meetings – a form of taking attendance at the beginning of a workday – for shops and companies in Shanghai and Shenzhen.

Amanda and her daughter live a quiet life on an American farm, but when the remains of her estranged mother arrive from Korea, Amanda becomes haunted by the fear of turning into her own mother.

Along the desert, through the Gobi, across the mountains, bypassing the valley, is a piece of green land. Scattered residents have settled down in various villages by the mountain. The villagers of each town promised to return to the original site where they lived 27 years ago. Grazing sheep, galloping horses, and dog-fighting tournaments, is it the joy of reunion or sacrificial delight?

Taking its title from a Chinese proverb, the two-channel video observes three men up a tree imitating animal sounds. Absurdist in tone, an ancient custom from rural China is brought to an urban park in a commentary on migration and loss of tradition.

In a performance that renders time visible and tangible, Zhou Tao traces his own movements around his apartment with a ball of string hooked to his back that gradually unravels. Slowly but surely, 'time' takes over the apartment: at certain moments creating obstacles and at other times providing physical support. Presented as an excerpt from the longer video work Time in New York.

In-between zones are where Zhou Tao situates his subtly off-kilter work that unravels at a soothingly sedated pace. As we observe dragon-boat rowers train in heavily vegetated areas of the city, we are transported in and out of reality and performance, winter and summer, Paris and Guangzhou.

Fragmented coastal scenes scattered across the Guangdong–Hong Kong–Macao Greater Bay Area: a security guard on duty at a Shenzhen beach, a woman posing for bridal photos along the West Kowloon Waterfront Promenade, children playing in the shallows beneath a bridge, the transparent glass interior of the M+ Museum, the rooftop of Sky100, the upper reaches of the Pearl River, and the waterfront of Victoria Harbour in Hong Kong, among others. Most of these filming locations were chosen from lists of photogenic sites popular on Xiaohongshu (RedNotes), i.e. places that have become “internet-famous” through a single viral post, attracting waves of photographers and tourists. Yet the artist deliberately diverges from these original images, turning away from the sharply defined details and edges of these celebrated sites. Instead, the camera retreats into marginalized zones at the limits of visibility, areas suffused with blinding halos of light.

Here in The Worldly Cave (Fán Dòng), the Hakka people have all moved away from the place where generations of their families lived. Before the execution of the new development, all the villages on this land will soon be buried into continuous muck dunes. On the open grounds, there stocked huge piles of second-hand machines which would be resold in the southeastern countries. Estate investigation teams gathered in different groups, were talking about the potential prices of the land. After passing some huge muck dunes, between two higher muck dunes, the hunters built their sheltered pits and bird traps in the air. They tied a bee to a transparent string as it would lead them to the beehives hidden in the cracks. Fishermen even found a source of fish in the swamp that connects the groundwater. The men and women in the giant ferroconcrete caves on the clouds were still chattering about the bullfrogs from lunch.

Ju and I have resided for nearly a whole year in the area of South Stone, of which appeared to be a distant village completely abandoned by the city, yet maintaining its very own independent system of living. Our perceptive consciousnesses were re-ignited (by the situation of South Stone area), Our activities here made hap-pening of improvised scripts, of images, and of body exercises, on the new time path, we are to be the man who plants scenarios.

Zhou Tao spent nearly two years in an eco-industrial park at the foot of the Kunlun Mountains. The result is a rich repertoire of images that swiftly alternate between natural landscapes of sandstorms, dust clouds and the changing seasons, and realistic portraits of humans and other species fighting for survival in a state of exception.

I and other person, we exercise the daily movements by moving each other's body.

An experimental short by Tao Zhou.

I spent a day inside a small abandoned military fort by the sea. With the tide went up and down, I appeared and disappeared into the water.

Blue and Red takes place in two different cities, weaving together sequences of night-time spectacles in the public spaces of Guangzhou (where Zhou lives) with footage of the 2013–14 Occupy Bangkok protests that took place while he was visiting the city. In both cities, Zhou concentrates on public spaces as collective experience, highlighting the areas and their occupants in washes of color, particularly the electric blue of LED light, which he contrasts with the surface of a third space, the toxic red run-off of a heavy metal mine in northern Guangdong province.