Gao Brothers

Author: Gao Qiang
Publisher:
Publish Date: 2006-09-01
Features: The works of the Gao Brothers can be clearly identified as a form of "urban art" in China, characterized by their cultural specificity and concrete themes. They focus on the urban living conditions and value orientations as a backdrop, employing mediums such as performance and photography to address the dramatic transformations of modern Chinese cities and the resulting issues. Here, they are more concerned with the realities and illusions of urbanization in China since the 1990s, rather than the tangible benefits brought by modernization. Instead, they give voice to a critical stance of an artist. In other words, the images, borrowings, collages, and constructed photographs in the Gao Brothers' "performances" are shaped by China's unique historical circumstances. Their works fall into two categories: one that genuinely records their own life processes and original conditions, emphasizing the discovery of truthful documentation, and another that suggests reality through references to daily life, employing staged fiction techniques and strategies to achieve a form of truth. This involves reconstructing reality and supplementing it with fiction, emphasizing the perspective of the creative subject to express and interpret hidden truths. They transform diverse human appearances into pure visual forms, taking this form to an dazzling and unsettling degree to reinforce their thinking, judgment, and critique. The art of the Gao Brothers possesses an intellectual quality and a self-reflective spiritual focus, which led them to take a relatively solitary and independent path in the 1990s. Their art extensively explored and expressed various forms of avant-garde art throughout the decade, including installation art, performance art, and conceptual art, through experimental approaches across different mediums. Their true emergence came in 1989 with the "Modern Art Exhibition," where they blew a powerful symbol of Libido in the museum to oppose the mainstream ideology of the time. From the late 1980s to the present, they have seemed to always walk on the edge of the times, but a fundamental thread has remained unchanged: a critique of otherworldliness, intellectuals, self-attention to the soul, and the pursuit of artistic experimentation. The Never-Finished Building (2001-2005) and Black Space (2005) are representative series of their recent creations, as well as the of the Gao Brothers.
Seeking the Village of Petitioners. In 1979, my father died after being illegally detained and tortured for 25 days during the Cultural Revolution in 1968.