Period: Until May 26th, 2019

Entry Fee: ￥30

Venue: 19F Main Exhibion Hall, Guangdong Times Museum

Nearby metro station: Exit D, Huangbian Station, Line 2

“The Ridge in A Bronze Mirror” is an allegory of contemporary archeology that takes the archaic medium of bronze mirror to project a speculative rhetoric, a topography of conflict and a whirlpool of untimely images.

Zhou Tao, South of the Mountains, 2019

single channel 4K video with sound

Courtesy of the artist and Vitamin Creative Space

Unlike glass, bronze cannot produce a perfect representation; and the mirror could be an object carried over from the distant past as one brought back from a distant future. Designated as means of self-referentiality, “The Ridge in A Bronze Mirror” dwells on the unconsummated, in the hope of articulating the unspeakable of a certain locale.

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.

“The White-Haired Man”

2019, installation with drawings and furniture, dimension variable

Courtesy of the artist and Vitamin Creative Space

For the artist, every act of image-making is a direct confrontation with reality, and the perceptions, feelings and memories engaged by the filming process can be converted through and into images, which have the potential to connect the human eye with the body, and to revise a world heavily mediated by technology. Human agency is not only manifested in transforming the external world, but can also be exercised by preserving the internal, poetic space. The coupling of realism and romanticism creates a mesmerizing tension in Zhou Tao’s work.