Sophia Yadong Hao’s Heavy Water formed part of ONE YEAR ON – a strand of the Festival with work by artists who had been part of the Elevator programme at the 2009 Festival. The strand offered continuing support to artists in their early career, while audiences had the opportunity to track this development over the year.

From the original Festival website:

Thoughts lose their purpose, their meaning, their importance, thoughts become surplus, redundant, unwanted, thoughts become implausible, impractical, thoughts become unrealistic and wrong.

There are some thoughts that need to be dropped, deliberately lost, put beyond reach.

Sophia Hao will work on the mothballing of these thoughts.

Sophia Yadong Hao is a UK-based Chinese artist working with processes of erasing and preserving. She studied in MMU and obtained her MA in Visual Culture with distinction in 2005.

She exhibits works both in the UK and internationally. She was twice an invited artist for Vital: International Live Art Festival. She was also one of the collaborative performers of Ornamental Happiness, directed by Rose English and commissioned by Liverpool Biennial 2006. In 2008, Hao lived in a remote Chinese village and made I am not a Fairytale, an addendum to Chinese artist Ai Wei-wei’s work for documenta 12.

As well as being an artist, Hao is a curator, writer and lecturer. She is Principal Curator of Exhibitions (Cooper Gallery) and Visual Research Centre at Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art and Design, Dundee. She curated NOTES on a return, a large-scale exhibition revisiting seminal performance works made in the 1980s. This project explored the documenting and archiving of ephemeral practices to critically question the efficacy of re-enactment.