Ni Hao’s practice investigates the hidden architectures that shape contemporary life. Working with the residue of modern systems such as filters mottled with dust, warped credit cards, resin-sealed garments, and dormant mechanical fragments, he creates sculptural environments that seem to breathe, tremble, or quietly malfunction. His installations reveal the emotional and infrastructural currents of the everyday. Surveillance devices appear to cough up memory, domestic routines drift toward isolation, and networks of desire hum with a persistent, uneasy charge.

A central idea in his work is the poltergeist, an unseen force that communicates through objects rather than language. Ni Hao approaches sculpture as a choreography of disturbances, where materials shift, resist, or strain against their assigned roles. His works behave like the systems they portray, redirecting flows of power, intimacy, and attention. Through precise material inquiry he reveals the strange and often overlooked poetry embedded in the objects that surround us.

Ni Hao was born in Hsinchu, Taiwan in 1989 and is currently living and working in Hsinchu. In 2025 his work was featured in the Taipei Biennial, Basel Social Club, and Art Basel Hong Kong. His recent solo exhibitions include The Air Beneath Our Feet at T293 in Rome (2024) and AHU: Walking in Ether at Fotoaura Institute of Photography in Tainan (2024). He received a BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2011 and an MFA in Sculpture from the Rhode Island School of Design in 2014.

His work has been exhibited at UCCA Center for Contemporary Art in Beijing, MOCA Taipei, the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art in Seoul, and the Gwangju Biennale Pavilion Project with Palais de Tokyo, as well as Boston Center for the Arts and the Queens Museum. His works are held in the collections of MMCA Seoul, Collezione Taurisano in Naples, and VMAC in Hong Kong. He has participated in residencies including serving as a guest artist at Arts at CERN in Geneva and as the International Artist-in-Residence at MMCA Residency Changdong in Seoul. His practice also extends into cross-disciplinary contexts, including a collaboration with Balenciaga for its 53rd Couture Collection in Paris. His work has been covered in publications such as The New York Times, Artnews, and Frieze, e-flux, and ArtAsiaPacific.

Can you tell us about your background and how you started your artistic journey?

I was born in Hsinchu, Taiwan, and later moved with my family to Vancouver, Canada, where I went to middle and high school. The shift from a dense Taiwanese city to the copy-and-paste suburb of Coquitlam felt surreal, like living inside the intro of The Simpsons but without any of the humor. Everything looked the same, everyone ended up at the same mall, and immigrant groups stayed in their own bubbles, clinging to slightly outdated versions of their home cultures, like time capsules running a few years behind reality.

To escape the airlessness of it all, I hid in the school art program. I thought I was going to become an illustrator or a graffiti artist. I got obsessed with Banksy, made terrible stencils, learned how to mix wheatpaste, and briefly convinced myself I could learn to skateboard, until I realized I was too scared to drop into that curved wall thing at the skatepark.

There was also a period when my friends and I were determined to start a band. We listened to a ridiculous amount of Nirvana and played mostly Kings of Leon because we had not written anything ourselves. Our only “show,” for about eight people, lasted five minutes before someone threw something at us and the bassist ran off to fight him. That was the end of that.

Since I was already failing math and science, those paths were off the table, so art school became the only option. And that is basically how the whole thing started.

What are the main themes or concepts you explore in your work?

I do not really think in terms of themes or concepts, because they feel like furniture arranged too neatly in a room I would rather keep a little crooked. What actually draws me are forces, forms, movements, the soft murmurs under reality’s skirt, the quiet currents that convince things to appear, disappear, and reappear wearing slightly different faces. I move among them like someone trying to overhear a secret conversation between matter and being as one slowly shapeshifts into the other without announcing its intentions.

It is like tracing rhythms that pretend to be shy but are actually everywhere, vibrating behind the wallpaper of existence. Sometimes I picture the world from far above, colors drifting toward each other like they are flirting, splitting apart like they are embarrassed, stillness tripping into motion, light suddenly deciding it wants to feel heavy for a moment. These movements feel like brushing against something that arrived before language, some backstage architecture of consciousness humming to itself while no one is looking.

The energies I work with, creation, tension, dissolution, behave like they are following a manual written by an ancient intelligence with bad handwriting. If you step far enough back, everything loses its edges and the whole world starts breathing very slowly, as if trying to remember what it used to be in a previous life, possibly a rock or a very contemplative cloud.

When I work with different materials such as wood, metal, sound, light, and yes, even the unruly soul of internet memes, I am basically attempting to smuggle those invisible forces into forms we can accidentally feel. My works often turn into odd little scenarios about how things relate to us and how we awkwardly relate back. They can be absurdly poetic, sometimes without meaning to. These connections happen constantly in daily life, like a sudden tenderness between two objects on your desk that were never introduced to each other.

If you stare long enough, the world gives you tiny, fragile truths, the kind that shimmer once and then vanish, pretending they were never there. My work just tries to catch a few of those disappearing moments and pin them down long enough for someone else to notice, even if the moment wiggles a bit and tries to escape.

How has your artistic style evolved over time?

I actually used to have a pretty distinct artistic style. I drew a lot of hairy monsters when I was young, the kind of creatures that would look incredible on T-shirts and stickers and whatever else I could get my hands on. That was the universe I lived in for a long time. Over the years, though, my work shifted into something much more concept driven. Now every project starts with an idea, and the aesthetics step in as support structures, bridges, or surfaces for that idea to travel through. There are still hints of those old whimsical, hairy creatures buried in the work, but you only notice them if you already know where to look. Style for me now is just a tool. Every style has its usage and the kind of mood or message to deliver. In this world filled to the brim with signs and symbols and every imaginable color, how can you just stick with a single style? Would it not make more sense to be a ninja of all styles?

Can you describe a recent project or artwork that you are particularly proud of?

Most recently, I have been working on a series of sculptures made from worn socks. I purchase the socks through Taiwan’s underground online foot-fetish marketplace, and as part of the exchange, I ask each seller to send me a short video of themselves putting the socks on and taking them off in the most ordinary way. No performance, no acting, and no sexualization. Just the quiet, habitual gesture everyone does without thinking.

In the studio, I preserve the socks in resin. The process functions like a form of taxidermy, sealing in every crease, fiber, and trace of use, and turning something soft and temporary into a sculptural remnant. Each piece carries the faint, ghostly presence of the person who once wore it, as if an everyday moment had been paused and held in place. The videos are shown beside the sculptures, so the object and the gesture that shaped it appear together.

Placed side by side, the socks and the videos form quiet, anonymous portraits built from the simplest routine. The resin taxidermy holds the physical residue, while the videos hold the movement and time. When seen together, something familiar becomes unexpectedly intimate, almost tender.

This series is currently on view at the Taipei Fine Arts Museum for the 14th Taipei Biennial, running from November 1, 2025 to March 29, 2026. If you visit, you can encounter the ghostly presence of the preserved socks and the soft choreography of the gestures unfolding in person.

What challenges have you faced as an artist, and how have you overcome them?

The biggest challenge I have ever faced is people. Humans are truly the strangest creatures. They move through the world with no logic, no consistency, and no self-awareness, yet they behave with total confidence. They judge instantly, attack impulsively, invent stories out of nothing, do their jobs terribly, and operate according to an emotional physics that has nothing to do with reason. They think they know everything. They can be loud and vicious toward someone they have never met, and when they actually like your work, they guard that affection like a personal secret no one can ever find out about. It is bewildering. It is exhausting. It is the part of being an artist that no one prepares you for.

And this is the one problem you never solve in your life or career. The politics of people. The chaos of their moods and motives. The endless loop of insecurities, projections, fantasies, and misunderstandings. People are an ecosystem of problems, and those problems multiply faster than anything you could ever make in the studio.

The only real solution is the acceleration of the sixth mass extinction.

What do you hope people take away from your art when they experience it?

When a work leaves my studio, I no longer control what people take away from it. It stops belonging to me and starts belonging to everyone else. Under international copyright norms including the Berne Convention, the WIPO Copyright Treaty, and the TRIPS Agreement, authors retain moral rights over attribution, but they have no legal obligation to manage, guide, correct, or take responsibility for audience interpretation. What people think they saw is legally their own problem.

Interpretive liability does not exist. Courts in multiple jurisdictions including the EU, the UK, and Canada have consistently ruled that an author is not responsible for how the public reads, misreads, misunderstands, overreacts to, or emotionally deteriorates because of a work. In EU doctrine this is sometimes framed as freedom of interpretation, and in the UK it aligns with the principle that personal responses do not constitute harm or authorial fault.

Consumer-protection frameworks such as the UN Guidelines for Consumer Protection and EU Directive 2019/2161 regulate goods and services, not emotional responses, symbolic confusion, or existential crises triggered by contemporary art. Under these frameworks, an artwork is not considered a defective product simply because someone had a feeling about it.

The UN Special Rapporteur in the field of cultural rights has also affirmed that audiences hold independent rights to meaning making, which means any reaction, projection, panic, or imaginative detour belongs entirely to them.

Once the work is in the world, whatever you think it means is yours to handle. I produce the artwork, not the user manual for your emotional life.

No refunds, no exchanges, no liability for damages, and no warranty of interpretive satisfaction. Buyer beware.

Text & photo courtesy of Ni Hao

Website: https://haoni.art/
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/nihao.art/