Gao Shiqiang 高士强
From ArtSpeak China (ASC) Wiki
Gao Shiqiang is a Chinese video artist and photographer, born in 1971. Gao lives and works in Hangzhou.
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Date & Place of Birth
Art
Gao Shiqiang is one of the recent “scholarly” artists in the field of Chinese contemporary art. Gao’s work carries a sense of broadness and complexity towards the reflection and bodily experience of daily life—such qualities are rarely found amongst his peers. His recent pieces move away from the narrow confines of competing ways of thinking, and in turn, he brought a way of conceiving Chinese history and culture to new heights. Gao's epic Butterfly Lovers (2006) is a tragic love story that serves as an allegory for the new millennium.[1]
Great Bridge, shot in black-and-white, uses the Nanjing Bridge as a contemporary lens through which to view 20th century Chinese history. A symbol of nationalistic pride, the bridge was built over the Yangtze River in the 1960s. Gao's film centers around a middle-aged man in a domestic setting. Fragments of memories of the past intersect with the static central narrative, as do scenes of a group of young academics discussing the legacy of Nanjing Bridge. A ghostly female voice whispers ‘daqiao', another name for the bridge, throughout the work.
Gao created Faint With Oxygen as the result of an invitation to produce a work on the Tibetan plateau. The video begins with a series of close-up portraits of shepherds in high grasslands, focusing eventually on a young man, Gairi Luosong Gelai, who was forced to teach himself Chinese by listening to the radio. While the work takes a panoramic look at a particular landscape and its inhabitants, it also examines the way language can spark the cultural imagination.[2]
Red (50:06, 2008) plays on a flat-screen TV, and shows a man wandering over a vast field of wet grey soil, which stretches all the way to a pale slate horizon. Attached to reeds protruding from the ashen mud are torn fragments of red cloth that convulse in the wind. The subjects in Gao’s landscape seem utterly disoriented to find themselves with their feet sinking into the earth beneath.
The political symbolism is unmistakable. "The Red Revolution was, undoubtedly, a magnificent jolt and beautiful ideal. But this ideal brought constant tragedy to mankind," writes Gao in his statement about this piece. "For those of my generation, history has transformed into a trance, and the real world into a joke."[3]
Exhibitions
For Gao's exhibition history, click here.
Gallery Affiliation(s)
Gao is represented by Magee Art Gallery in Beijing and Max Protetch in New York.
References
- ↑ http://events.pe.com/newport-beach-ca/events/show/88837291-video-work-by-gao-shiqiang-and-chen-qiulin
- ↑ http://www.artslant.com/ny/events/show/31828-gao-shiqiang
- ↑ http://www.artnet.com/magazineus/reviews/banks/huang-rui-gao-shiqiang7-6-09.asp
