Hue and Ways of the World
2023.12.08 - 2024.01.20
Artist: Gao Ge
Curator: agai
Gao Ge is good at painting colors - all kinds of colors, which are often played in her paintings like a song. It can be said that the splendor and colorful hue are the first impression of her paintings.
However, in the recent works on display at the Cub_ism_ Artspace, the rhythm of colors and brushstrokes has humbly taken a back seat, giving way to images, contours and flat paintings, and replacing them with a clearer sense of structure, volume, and strong chiaroscuro in the picture. Those short lines and even dotted strokes that used to charge like array have somehow reduced their own volume, and the ones that have made their appearance are smoother planes - like oily liquids that are different, being blown by an invisible tube, repelling edges of each other, and the interior of each part is divided by the color gamut again, forming colorful silhouettes - yes, a face, a body and limbs, together with all the decorations and clothes, as if they had always existed embedded in colors in this way.
The artist breaks away from the "natural" reproduction of color in the physical world and uses color in an unconventional way as an important means of giving shape. In Gao Ge's paintings, colors, together with the proleptic strokes that fill in colors and the recent flat brushstrokes, are both the result of the artist’s Expressionnisme, and reveal her mode of thinking and perception - the world unfolds in front of the artist's eyes in the form of colors, and then returns to the hue under the artist's swift brushstrokes.
Behind the hue, there is in fact ways of the world. The term "ways of the world" is originally called "worldly phase", which is a general term for the objective world, such as the appearance and situation of society. However, unlike the objectivity emphasized in ways of the world, in Gao Ge's paintings, the environment is compressed into an irrelevant background, in general, deprive the meaning of characters' behaviors and actions of a larger frame of reference, and diffuse an atmosphere of ambiguity, contradiction, and uncertainty in the picture.
Creating "meaning" in painting, or how to express ways of the world through the hue, is, as the British aesthetician Clive Bell suggests in Art, a specific combination of lines, colors, and spatial elements that constitute a significant form; in Gao Ge's case, variations in the language of form - even internal variations within the same series at the same time - stimulate different associations and feelings in the viewer.
Gao Ge demonstrates order from beginning to end, with colors and brushstrokes forming the rhythm, and the rhythm forming the structure and shape, ultimately setting the boundaries for the viewer to see. When "what to paint" is no longer a problem, and "how to paint" is worth investing more effort in, painting becomes a kind of self-evident labor, a game that cannot and does not need to be stopped, because ways of the world are in flux, and the hue is ever-changing. Faced with the instant endless surging of capture and creation - Gao Ge picked up the paintbrush again and again.
