Beijing-based multidisciplinary artist Hong Hao works with photography, printmaking, collage, video installation, and painting to probe the culture of capitalist consumption in China, investigating the complex relationships that we have with our possessions and pointing to the paradox of excess in a communist country.

After graduating from the printmaking department of the prestigious Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing in 1989, Hong embarked upon a body of work of photographic collages made by assembling items like maps, receipts, food, and banknotes in a scanner. The scanner bed ultimately flattened these items, upending their hierarchies of value. Well-known bodies of work include “My Things” (begun 2001), in which Hong organized his possessions by form and color, and “Selected Scriptures” (1992-2000), in which the artist made prints of maps that subverted the tradition of the woodblock-printed book with its implications of fixed meaning. His work can be found in numerous public collections including those of the Ashmolean Museum of Art and Archeology at the University of Oxford, the Hong Kong Museum of Art, the British Museum in London, and the Museum of Modern Art in New York.