WORK / LIVE 干活 Zhao Haibo 赵海波

In spring, Arrow Factory presented Burn, a new installation by Zhao Haibo 赵海波 and the Social Sensibility Research Institute. A semi-abstract photograph of glowing embers – a pile of charred corn cobs – is shown as a lightbox in the street-side window of the space, burning bright and fading in slow, regular cycles. Framed like a floating planet or a view through a microscope, the image is at once an expression of home and hearth and a sign of quiet resilience, echoed by the daily life that goes on behind the grey walls of the hutong. Postcards of the image were also left anonymously around the neighbourhood, like small exclamation marks.

Zhao Haibo grew up working the fields in a small village near Qiqihar. In 2016 he came to Beijing and found a job at Bernard Controls, a mid-sized actuator factory in the south of the city, which also hosts the department and its WORK / LIVE project, run by Alessandro Rolandi and Tianji Zhao.

At first his contact with the two artists was limited to short chats during breaks. Slowly it grew into an exchange of art books, which he studied intensely, and into conversations about the ideas they contained. The artists never ask employees to make art; they make themselves available to those who are interested. After eighteen months, Zhao Haibo showed them an abstract painting he had made on the lid of an industrial paint bucket, using spray paint to build up relief. From then on the collaboration began in earnest, and he extended his experiments to photography and video with his mobile phone.

Burn was the fifth collaboration between the department and Arrow Factory: a single creative gesture that follows Zhao Haibo’s slowly smouldering path from a farm to an urban factory to a window in the hutong.

Text adapted from the Arrow Factory introduction.