Gao Fan reveals the typical characteristics of the young people of our time, just like something commonly found in diverse comments on bālínghòu1 or Post-80s artists. Artists born after the 1980s do not pursue any grandiose discourse nor do they have deep scars or emotional baggage. They are interested merely in disclosing their artistic personality. They do not hesitate in making very straightforward comments instead of elusive statements. They are also more competent in self-expression as compared to previous generations. They are never nervous or anxious about working in the blurred categories of contemporary art and take initiative in their work using their own distinctive idioms.
Bālínghòu artists grew up amid a head-on collision and contradiction between conventional education and offbeat contemporary culture and were actively supported and cared for by their parents. Accordingly, their elemental perception of traditional culture and their self-centered personality exist simultaneously in their inner world. They also display an overly-tolerant attitude towards various changes in society. They show a flexible reaction to the collision between Eastern and Western culture as well as modifications made to their own culture, generating completely new models amid such a complex cultural crash caused by the ever-evolving Internet and electronic media as well as informatization and imagification.
Gao Fan, one such Bālínghòu artist, has worked with the theme “material property and mind.” His works are largely divided into three periods in terms of their subject. In particular, he has made an effort to bridge his quotidian experience to artistic and aesthetic explorations in the process of developing his work.
His serialized pieces such as Play in the Forest and In the Future that he completed during his college days demonstrate the hallmarks of his early works. His pieces from this period are laden with agonies about his individual life and survival rather than being an exploration of some aesthetic value or context. He entered college with great ambition to achieve his dreams but what he found himself facing was a chaotic world fraught with IT technology. Digital technology enables us to generate and dissipate any image very easily and quickly. We are apt to be carried away by digital images because they are visually very intense and provocative. Once wedded to this world, it is hard to discover a free space where we can attain our dreams and ideas. This situation brings about a turning point in our ways of survival. Our ability to think seems to have degenerated in this era in which we are able to glean knowledge with ease through videos and Internet searches in lieu of reading books, thinking, and discussing issues. Gao Fan suggests that we can only be free in dreams and things will not change even though we realize this. He questions the manner of our existence in his work.
His second series including Vagueness, Loss of the Personality, Recharge and The City are more explicit showcases of our contradictory ways of survival. These works hold fear and anxiety about the reality in which each individual’s personality is removed and replaced with standardized characters as our society is swept by a wide array of trends due to overflowing Internet media. The Internet has brought a tremendous amount of information to mankind like God’s salvation but we have lost our own identities and thoughts in the deluge of information. We feel uneasy about provocative worlds in virtual reality offered by the Internet and come to restrict ourselves. This situation is eloquently represented in his work Recharge. He demonstrates not only his anxiety about the future but also his aggressive will to escape by raising questions concerning present situations. In this period his work hit a turning point. He made forays into expanding the concepts of his work addressing existential agony and exploring time rather than being wedded to mere interpretations of social phenomena.
After this period, the theme of life was represented more simply and candidly. He seems to judge that it is more meaningful to strive to find out truthful manifestations to hold the worth of life if he is unable to resist the Internet media. Gao Fan has confronted our hypocrisy, pretense, and desire in the course of exploring the value of being made up of time, dream, and truth. In A Thousand Faces, the artist enables us to consider the aspects of acting differently in accordance with situations. Also, his other works like The Weight of Knowledge and A Difference between Light and Dark demonstrate an intriguing contrast between truth and falsehood, reality and fiction, light and dark, and reality and desire.
Gao Fan represents the feeling of helplessness we have when we have to adapt ourselves to time in his recent series such as Stress from Time and The Weight of Time, implying his expectation and endeavor to use given time efficiently. In particular, another work A Dream Has No Wing lays out his narratives, displaying his determination to fly high in order to reach his dreams even though he has no wings.
Gao Fan does not compel viewers to sympathize with his work. He just tries to hold his anguish about time and the process of his exploration in his work. His anguish is not about something individual but aspects of the rapidly changing world of young people. Their lives today are fraught with anxiety and precariousness which is symbolized by one who wears a mask and has no eyes in his work. And yet, Gao Fan still explores possibilities and dreams. This serves as momentum to enable him to continue his exploration and endeavors. Our expectation is what his figures without pupils in his or her eyes will look like in his upcoming pieces.
