Interview with Kexin Hao

For the exhibition Out of Office (Still Here) Quiller MacQuarrie conducted interviews with various artists. This interview is with Kexin Hao, the creator of the interactive video game and performance Future Dance of Nostalgia. Hao contemplates the relationship between dance and labor. Inspired by work songs from before the industrial revolution she created this dancing game to encourage audiences to dance and move together.

Quiller:

How do you see your work connect to the themes of the exhibition? Access to free time and leisure in relation to summer vacation or being outside in the sun?

Kexin:

My work explores the tension between hard labor and leisure, which are seemingly distant topics, but it explores the in-between of these two distant territories and questions if labor can be transformed into leisure or entertainment and gaming, and if a game can also be about work. In that sense, it fits perfectly.

Quiller:

Does your artistic practice feel more like leisure, play, or work and labor?

Kexin:

It's such a meaningful question. It's not only about the topics in my work, but also working as an artist itself. It's completely playful — it's me playing, it's me having fun, but then it's working as well. A very direct example is that sometimes I perform at bars, clubs, parties, or festivals. For visitors, it's entertainment and a recreational activity. For me, I cannot tell — should I party? Should it be festive? Should I have fun? Or is it work? And then later I send the invoice with my hours. My work is also me having fun and entertaining the audience. Working itself as a freelancer is also me being confused — and sometimes happily confused, because I love being in that state of confusion and letting everyone else be confused too.

Quiller:

What is work? What is play? How much do you get to play within work?

Kexin:

It's like I suffer at the same time as I labor. It's fun, but also tough and hard. I think for a lot of artists it's like this — you start doing it because you want to play, you want to have fun, and then you have stress and deadlines and you suffer. But you keep wanting to do it, knowing that you will suffer. You can't resist it. You can't sacrifice the fun.

Quiller:

What is your favorite memory from a summer period?

Kexin:

I couldn't really say favorite, but I have some really specific summer memories I wanted to share with you. In China, summer vacations for school kids from primary school through high school aren't really vacations — they're more of a buffer time for kids to improve their studies and scores. It's a time when you can take extracurricular courses and, by the new semester, you could become the smartest kid. My summers were spent in extracurricular courses — math and English mostly. When I was younger it was more talent-oriented, like piano and drawing, but from middle school onward, I spent a lot of summer days in study rooms and public libraries alongside people preparing for accounting and law exams, doing exam papers.

Those years were so strange because it didn't sound like free time at all. But I also felt a kind of agency — like I was being so adult. I was resisting playing, going to the public library, doing papers — but I was only 14 or 15. And when I was 17 and 18, I spent two summers in weight loss camps. That's something I would never do now — my body is stable and I don't have those insecurities anymore — but when I was younger, I was super insecure. I was 90 kilos and felt so ugly. I begged my parents to pay for these two-week camps where everybody gathered in the gym and did four hours of exercise per day. We lived there, ate there, and had a coach.

So looking back at my youth, a lot of summers didn't really relate to idleness, but to these strange disciplines.

Quiller:

What do you like to do with your free time now?

Kexin:

It's still quite a struggle, because every time I get asked this question, I struggle to answer — I don't really have a clear division between free time and work time. But since this year, I've started to have a hobby. Every Tuesday evening I go to choir, where I don't feel the pressure of it being work. When I was little, if someone asked this question, I would have said I draw. But drawing is my work now, so that's no longer the answer.

In the choir, I don't have the pressure of performance in that way — it doesn't remind me of work, even though I also sing in my performances. Being in a choir really feels free. You blend in with everybody, you read the harmony, and it's about how the group sounds, not how good you individually are.

Quiller:

How does dancing connect to leisure versus labor? Is it more laborious or leisurely?

Kexin:

It's such a mix. In my work, I research a lot of work dances and work songs, which are rooted in labor — especially hard and manual labor. Those work songs and dances then became inspirations for songs and dances that are purely recreational. I look at a lot of archives and trace how things developed and what they originally were. Before diving into archives, I started thinking about songs like "Working in the Coal Mine" by Devo. I also have a playlist I can share. One piece is a Spanish song from the 1980s — it's such a pop song, but it reflects a fantasy of Japanese society being super disciplined, functional, punctual, and highly industrialized. I see a lot of pop culture references appropriating work songs and implementing a fantasy of working-class, blue-collar, hard labor. The work song I feel most connected to is "Bella Ciao." My choir actually sang it at a Christmas concert in a Lutheran church last year, and I got the honor of introducing the piece. I told the fully-seated audience about its background — how it originated as a work song in the mountains of Northern Italy, where women working rice fields used it to sing against the landlords who exploited them. It was a song of resistance. It then became an antifascist song in Italy during the war. I really love this as an example of how a work song can be so simple and yet carry so much — resistance, politics, ideology. What makes them so powerful is that the rhythms have to be simple to help workers coordinate and synchronize their movements. That simplicity makes them easy to spread and become slogans, even propaganda. "The East is Red," which praises Mao and communist China, was originally a farmer's song — the farmers loved Chairman Mao and used it to praise him. Many political songs, even national anthems, were originally work songs.

Quiller:

Would you say that song, dance, and movement of the body are leisure activities that help humans cope with the stresses of the society we live in — and if so, can they be seen as a form of resistance against capitalist restraints?

Kexin:

I think song, dance, and movement — as we've discussed in the context of protests and workers' resistance movements — are incredibly important and powerful. But I was more thinking of them not as resistance against capitalist restraints, but as part of capitalist restraints. I was thinking: what if they're not resistance — how can we be alert to when dance becomes a capitalist restraint? I was thinking of people dancing in a club trying to blend in with the crowd, or rave culture becoming a sellable, consumerist product. Or going to a gym where you work out to have a better body, doing movements that fuel capitalist structures.

In my research I really liked the history of the treadmill. Treadmills were not always exercise equipment — they were a punishment device in early 20th century English prisons. The prisoners had to walk, and the machine was sometimes connected to grain grinding. It was purely a punishment to make you tired and disciplined. And now we do it recreationally. The treadmill is a tool to stay inside and run, purely for leisure. Sometimes exercise, dance, and movement are so linked to discipline and punishment that there's a fine line between those things and leisure, entertainment, and desire. One flip through history and you're in a very dark place.

Quiller:

Do you think there will be a time when we no longer have access to our bodies to dance?

Kexin:

When I was little, I had this dystopian — or utopian — vision that we were going to be separated from our physical bodies, uploading our consciousness to the cloud. But now I actually see the opposite desire emerging — an urge to come back to the physical body. So much is virtual, and fictional things feel so real, especially with AI and simulation. But I see a lot of people just wanting craft workshops. They just want to be together and dance. So no, I don't think people will give up their bodies.

Quiller:

Yeah, and especially when the internet was created, a lot of people thought it was the ultimate space for community. “Now you could be in communion with everyone.” And now that's not the case anymore.

Kexin:

Yeah, and a lot of people are starting to feel nostalgic about the blog era, or Web 1.0 — where you'd find a friend's website and they'd have URLs linking to other people's websites and you'd just explore organically. Now you're being fed by an algorithm catered specifically to you, so there's no sense of organic community. I keep hearing from people — though I haven't seen anyone actually doing it — that instead of posting on Instagram or sending newsletters, they want to send physical letters or handouts to friends to announce their upcoming events. That would be so nice.