Kano Tao
Winner Challenge
2023
Tao’s work has been presented internationally at venues and festivals including the 3rd SETA Festival “Mitologie Digitali” at Saletta Campolmi in Italy, Taizhou Contemporary Art Museum in China, The Holy Art Gallery in Greece, PH21 Gallery in Hungary, LossenArt Gallery in Italy, CICA Museum in South Korea, RuptureXIBIT Gallery in the United Kingdom and Kunstarkaden Gallery in Germany.
Statement
My work explores gender and the evolving relationship between technology and humanity. Through electronic art, performance, video and digitally generated images, I investigate how bodies and identities are represented, interpreted and controlled within contemporary society.
My practice also addresses surveillance, the construction of the self through media and the increasing tendency to experience identity through images, screens and data. Each work operates as a visual code whose meaning changes according to the viewer’s cultural background, personal experience and historical perspective.
Gender, power and society are interconnected throughout my research. I use technological and apparently rational systems to examine intimate, physical and emotional aspects of human experience. By bringing together data and desire, the virtual and the physical, artificial intelligence and the performing body, I question the boundaries between what is constructed and what is perceived as real.
Within these unstable territories, distinctions begin to dissolve. Technology and the body no longer appear as opposites, but as interconnected systems capable of generating new identities, new forms of perception and the possibility of an alternative utopia.
Focus
Yukang Tao’s practice focuses on the body as a site where gender, technology, visibility and power intersect. Through video, performance, animation and electronic art, Tao investigates how identity is constructed, observed and transformed within contemporary visual culture.
The artist is particularly interested in the tension between exposure and resistance: the body appears vulnerable, fragmented and repeatedly reproduced, yet this excess of visibility becomes a way to challenge conventional systems of representation. Surveillance, self-image, digital mediation and patriarchal structures are examined through works in which physical presence and technological processes continuously overlap.
By combining intimate human experience with artificial intelligence, data and moving images, Tao creates unstable visual territories where the boundaries between male and female, organic and artificial, self and other begin to dissolve. The work does not offer fixed answers, but opens a space for alternative identities and new forms of social and bodily imagination.
Why invest in...
Yukang Tao’s work addresses some of the most urgent questions shaping contemporary culture: the relationship between body and technology, the construction of gender, digital surveillance and the politics of visibility. Through performance, video, animation and electronic art, Tao develops a distinctive visual language in which physical presence and technological systems merge, creating works that are conceptually rigorous and immediately recognisable.
Tao’s international exhibition history, spanning museums, galleries and festivals across Europe and Asia, demonstrates the growing relevance of this research within the contemporary art field. Supporting the artist at this stage means engaging with a practice that is both formally experimental and strongly connected to the cultural debates defining our time.
For collectors interested in new media, performance and technology-based practices, Yukang Tao represents a compelling emerging voice with the potential to develop a significant and coherent long-term artistic trajectory.
Buy Through NNC Gallery
These works are the ones through which we selected the artist.
Their current production can be verified directly through their official contacts. We, as art advisors, are available to act as intermediaries and guarantors for any sales, ensuring a safe and transparent purchase process.
Contact us for more information.
How to Be Seen
2023
Video and real-time performance
How to Be Seen is a video and performative work examining the body as a territory shaped by visibility, desire, social control and gendered forms of perception.
Within a natural landscape, the artist places their body at the centre of a continuously shifting visual composition. Repeated images, fragmented anatomical details and a circular arrangement of egg-like forms transform the body into a site of tension between vulnerability and exposure, individuality and multiplication, self-representation and objectification.
The project understands chaos not as the absence of order, but as the simultaneous presence of multiple forces, identities and possibilities. By covering and surrounding the body with brightly coloured forms, Tao challenges the visual codes of patriarchal society and the conventional ways in which bodies are classified, desired and observed.
The performance produces what the artist describes as a condition of hyper-visibility: the body becomes so intensely exposed, repeated and visually amplified that it begins to resist conventional recognition. Visibility therefore becomes paradoxical. To escape the structures that determine how a body should be seen, the artist does not disappear, but becomes radically and excessively visible.
In this sense, How to Be Seen asks whether visibility can become a strategy of resistance, and whether the multiplication of the image can open a space in which identity remains unstable, relational and impossible to fully control.
