Born 1985, Shaanxi, China
Lives and works in Beijing, China

Hao Jingban’s video installations combine field research, archival study and live performance to explore the capacity of the moving image to capture and convey memory. Using found footage and new material, she constructs carefully considered soundtracks and unusual voiceovers. Best known for her 'Beijing ballroom' series, which comments on 1980s reform-era China, she has also documented subjects ranging from factory-based work practices to the policing of domestic migration in China.

For the multi-channel video installation Forsaken landscapes 2018–21, Hao collaborated with Ichiro Kataoka, a practitioner of the dwindling Japanese art of benshi (live narration for silent films). Focusing on the period of Japanese occupation of Manchuria, from 1932 to 1945, she excavates the film cultures of Manchuria and Inner Mongolia in China’s northeast, and uses the landscape and its history to address the representation of place and shifts in cinematic cultures and technologies. Forsaken landscapes draws on artefacts of colonialism and geopolitics that have been deliberately erased and remain barely accessible, even today.

_{Supported by the National Foundation for Australia-China Relations}