Solitude is one of the few conditions we both fear and romanticise, treated as something to be escaped and at the same time built into our idea of a life well lived. Salt Land sits inside that contradiction, constructing a world that is beautiful, exact and almost entirely emptied of people, and leaving open how much of its emptiness is refuge and how much is avoidance.
Mandy Zhang Art is pleased to present Salt Land, the first solo exhibition with the gallery by Michael Gao, curated by Joséphine May Bailey. Gao (b. 2002, Beijing) lives and works in London and graduated from the Royal College of Art last year. These twelve paintings are his first full body of work since joining the gallery, and his most personal to date.
Solitude is one of the few conditions we both fear and romanticise, treated as something to be escaped and at the same time built into our idea of a life well lived. Salt Land sits inside that contradiction, constructing a world that is beautiful, exact and almost entirely emptied of people, and leaving open how much of its emptiness is refuge and how much is avoidance.
The exhibition proceeds from a single piece of writing. Alongside the paintings, Gao wrote a short story following a boy who leaves a travelling carnival to keep a lighthouse, and who comes to describe the place as his 'citadel of solitude'. The paintings do not illustrate the text; they inhabit its atmosphere, borrowing its coastline, its light, its salt and its silence. The story is printed in full in the publication accompanying the exhibition, alongside an essay by the curator.
The title never appears in the story. A ‘salt land' is among the most seductive landscapes on earth and among the least survivable, bleached and level and hostile to nearly everything that attempts to live on it, and Gao's paintings hold something of that condition: immaculately controlled, quietly inhospitable, a territory in which nothing could be sustained for long.
Each work is built in masked layers. Backgrounds are airbrushed in acrylic ink, sprayed through a fine nozzle so that sky, sea and the lighthouse lens arrive as gradient alone, without a visible brushmark; the lighthouse is then taped out and sprayed in its turn, giving the lantern a hard silhouette against the blue. The animal is masked in the same way and painted last, both with the airbrush, and latterly with acrylic, and a traditional paintbrush, its musculature built up through dozens of small strokes. When the tape is lifted it is left with an edge sharp enough to read as collage, appearing laid upon its surroundings rather than standing within them, while beneath it the floor is a metal grid painted in exact perspective that holds firm as everything above it drifts.
Gao arrived at the airbrush by two separate routes: first through contemporary painting, and above all the work of Austin Lee, whose pictures begin as digital drawings before being remade by hand in screen-bright colour; and second, recognised only later, through the medical reference books kept by the uncle he lived with between the ages of two and six, whose illustrations, from cutaway hearts to branching nerves, were all airbrushed. A tool developed to make the invisible legible is turned here on something that resists description altogether, and the lighthouses in these paintings are present without ever entirely settling.
There is no human figure in any of the twelve works. In place of one there is a dog, often a sighthound, standing, or laying, on the narrow gallery of a lighthouse with the sea a long way below. Gao calls the dogs a foil, perhaps for himself and perhaps for the boy in the story, and has never quite said which. They are the most companionable animals we have, and here they are entirely alone, painted with a clarity nothing else in the picture is given.
Salt Land marks a distinct shift in a practice concerned with social dynamics, identity, violence and desire, and with domesticated animals as a counterpoint to human tension. Gao's recent painting was loud and saturated, full of hybrid figures and post-internet carnival imagery; here the carnival has not disappeared so much as moved into the story, and slowed down. What remains is a citadel built with enormous care, and a door left open just wide enough to look through.
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