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Hansel Tai
Hansel Tai is a Chinese-born artist and designer working and residing in Estonia. He holds a BA from the Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing and an MA from the Estonian Academy of the Arts in Tallinn.
Hansel Tai - DBMP(Diamond-Blue Milk Pierced) - 2018 - Model: Indrek MesiImage - Image by: Tanel Veenre
Hansel’s work focuses on queer culture in the Post-internet Epoch, in which the natural is shadowed by the body cult, deformation, subcultural signs and high gloss metal, and digital voodoo is materialised into fetish objects.
He is unsatisfied with the contemporary notion of time as a fluid rushing from the past towards the future, carrying us along a linear path.
Hansel Tai - Orchid - 2019 - Brass, silver, surgical stainless steel, chroming - Image by Hansel Tai
To Hansel, the future is now: time swells towards us from the future and the past, forming a hyperstitional reality. The apocalypse is here, but so is utopia.
Hansel Tai - Hyper-Renaissance - 2017 - Acrylic, rubber, silver - Image by Hansel Tai
His pierced jade and glitched-out chromey adornments encourage our mutation into cyborgs, bringing with them confusion, domination, information, euphoria, dystopia and nightmare all at once. They are multi-level skeuomorphs: real objects imitating digital ‘objects’ imitating real objects. They are something to grab onto as we are whipped about an ever-changing digital landscape, in which even us Gen Z Internet natives are lost. Reach out and touch them, feel them pierce your pixelated flesh.
Hansel Tai - Nude Jade Pierced - 2019 - Jade, surgical stainless steel, thread - Image by Hansel Tai
Hansel Tai - Nude Jade Pierced - 2019 - Jade, surgical stainless steel, rubber - Image by Hansel Tai
Hansel Tai - Nude Jade Pierced - 2019 - Jade, surgical stainless steel, rubber - Image by: Hansel Tai