Hansel Tai (he/him/they/them) is a Chinese-born artist and designer working and residing in Estonia. He holds a BA from the Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing and an MA from the Estonian Academy of the Arts in Tallinn. In 2018 he studied at the Gerrit Rietveld Academie in Amsterdam.

During 2020 – 2021 he was selected to join the GEM Z talent accelerator program initiated by Current Obsession and supported by the Creative Industries Fund NL. He is the winner of MISUI Award 2019 at Barcelona, Spain.

Cruising in the Wilderness
Phoebe zhennan wood, dye, stainless steel, nylon thread, rubber
6H x 8.5W x .125D inches
460.

Hansel’s work focuses on queer culture in the Post-internet Epoch, in which the natural is shadowed by the body cult, deformation, subcultural signs, high gloss metal, and digital voodoo is materialized into fetish objects.

He is unsatisfied with the contemporary notion of time as a fluid rushing from the past towards the future, carrying us along a linear path.

To Hansel, the future is now: time swells towards us from the future and the past, forming a hyperstitional reality. The apocalypse is here, but so is utopia. His pierced jade and glitched-out chromey adornments encourage our mutation into cyborgs, bringing with them confusion, domination, information, euphoria, dystopia and nightmare all at once.

They are multi-level skeuomorphs: real objects imitating digital ‘objects’ imitating real objects. They are something to grab onto as we are whipped about an ever-changing digital landscape.

Cruising in the Wilderness
Phoebe zhennan wood, dye, stainless steel, nylon thread, rubber
6H x 8.25W x .125D inches
620.

Cruising in the Wilderness
Phoebe zhennan wood, dye, stainless steel, nylon thread, rubber
8.5H x 3W x 1D inches
450.

Cruising in the Wilderness
Phoebe zhennan wood, dye, stainless steel, nylon thread, rubber
6H x 2.25W x 1D inches
450.