Hao Jingban: I Witness

Blending documentary sensibility with poetic construction, Hao Jingban makes moving-image installations that are emotionally precise, historically incisive, and formally experimental. Working slowly and off-camera, she treads carefully around histories that have been obscured, forgotten, or actively suppressed—those shaped by political rupture, cultural transition, or generational silence—building trust with her subjects over months or years and leaving room for refusal, anonymity, and fragmentation. Hao's first major US museum solo gathers recent work centered on _I Witness_ (2025), a three-channel installation that takes up the embodied residue of the COVID-19 pandemic: four participants move slowly through a well-lit apartment, their images punctuated by stories of loss—an older woman who sleeps alone and rises to clean her refrigerator, a group of young people pacing an open field. Set to an ambient hum of heavy breathing and refrigerator-like drones, _I Witness_ opens a space for the body's own testimony to be heard.