Darling Hurt Series Exhibition

This exhibition presents all five works in the Darling Hurt series through photographs, video and installations.

The Darling Hurt series was the first collaboration between artists Xiao Ke and Zi Han as the duo Xiao Ke × Zi Han. It comprises five outdoor socially engaged theatre performances made in an intensive sequence over less than a year, from 2011 to 2012. For them, creating means returning their artistic ideas to everyday life, allowing each idea to complete its own life process: “coming from life and vanishing into life”.

Theatre today has lost its voice. Shaped by ideology and consumption, the theatre system avoids engaging with the social realities unfolding every day. At the margins of this system, with almost no support, the two artists repeatedly funded what they felt was “the art that needed to be made”.

Six years later, these works are being exhibited together in their entirety for the first time. What they reveal are no longer fresh “wounds”, but “scars” that have never disappeared. The name Darling Hurt, and the artists’ deliberate rendering of “大力” (dali) as “Darling”, seem to open a passage through which we can reconsider the forms of quiet violence concealed in everyday life.