Hao Jingban, I Witness, 2025, Three-channel video installation, 54’41”, Edition of 6 + 2AP. Commissioned jointly by the Han Nefkens Foundation, Mori Art Museum, M+, and Singapore Art Museum. Image courtesy the artist and Blindspot Gallery
Hao Jingban
Blending documentary sensibility with poetic construction, Hao Jingban makes moving-image installations that are emotionally precise, historically incisive, and formally experimental.
Working slowly and off-camera, she treads carefully around histories that have been obscured, forgotten, or actively suppressed—those shaped by political rupture, cultural transition, or generational silence—building trust with her subjects over months or years and leaving room for refusal, anonymity, and fragmentation. Hao’s first major US museum solo gathers recent work centered on I Witness (2025), a three-channel installation that takes up the embodied residue of the COVID-19 pandemic: four participants move slowly through a well-lit apartment, their images punctuated by stories of loss—an older woman who sleeps alone and rises to clean her refrigerator, a group of young people pacing an open field. Set to an ambient hum of heavy breathing and refrigerator-like drones, I Witness opens a space for the body's own testimony to be heard.
Hao Jingban lives and works between Yunnan Province, China, and Berlin, Germany. She received an MA from the University of London and BA from Goldsmiths College. Recent solo exhibitions include Mori Art Museum, Tokyo (2025); Matadero Madrid (2020); OCT Contemporary Art Terminal, Xi’an, China (2019) and recent group exhibitions at venues including 36th Bienal de São Paulo (2025); Rockbund Art Museum (2025); TANK Shanghai (2024); West Bund Museum, Shanghai (2023); Seoul Mediacity Biennale (2021); among others. Hao’s works are in the collection of the M+, Hong Kong; Centre Pompidou, Paris; Frac Bretagne, Rennes; the Power Station of Art, Shanghai;, Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona, Barcelona.
Sponsors
Major support for Hao Jingban is provided by the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts.
Exhibitions at the List Center are made possible with the support of Audrey & James Foster, Lucy Moon-Lim & Richard Lim, Cynthia & John Reed, and Idee German Schoenheimer.
General operating support is provided by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology; the Council for the Arts at MIT; Keeril Makan, Vice Provost for the Arts at MIT; Dean Hashim Sarkis and the MIT School of Architecture + Planning; the Mass Cultural Council; and many generous individual donors. The Advisory Board Members of the List Visual Arts Center are gratefully acknowledged.