Trial For a Performative Artwork N°1, 2011, village of Shangyuan, Beijing, 2011.
Enlarge & Rinse L.H.O.O.Q in the darkroom, 06.09.2011.
“Gao Bo’s work, although based on photography, does not hesitate to step beyond the limits of the medium, sometimes humorously, as in the performance entitled Trial for a Performative Artwork. After covering the model’s body with non-corrosive photograpic emulsion, Gao Bo prints the portrait of Mona Lisa on the woman’s skin, before cleaning her body and entirely erasing the image. A tribute to Duchamp’s L.H.O.O.Q., the work is similarly impertinent, with the model’s pubic hair forming Mona Lisa’s “beard”. Here Gao Bo performs an exercise involving quotation, appearance and disappearance at the frontier of the burlesque, questioning the impermanence and truth of the images that haunt our imagination.
« After photography, short film and filmed performance event featuring a model taken as photographic body, receiving projected images and being cleansed of them….)
Received ideas and the receiving body. And we receiving the spectacle… as the body receives water… a reception where the image of the flesh remains, even as the image is removed. Our removal from the image, the presence of the body cleansed, at once a removal of what is received and a removal in place and time, we part, once removed, in receipt of a gift.
The ‘Mona Lisa’, Leonardo after Duchamp’s, ‘LHOOQ’, (1919). It is important to note the presence of humour and parody… most ancient and most efficient means of critique; adding grotesquerie to image acts as an auto-critique… Not least in the ‘Mona Lisa’ after its ‘defacement’, or appropriation, by Duchamp (the reference to Duchamp reminds us of his other proto- conceptual art work, as mentioned above); so it is that the projections, the ‘beard’, involve a double parody (the artist re-inscribes himself after Duchamp in a further layer of parody…). The match of beard and body hair offers a grotesque visual pun with the resulting humour as proof of the mismatch of projection and receiving surface, the body in question… so the becoming aware of the layers superimposed on such in our everyday actuality. »
Dr. Peter Nesteruk, 2016
The Eternity of being lost. Live performance work No. 1, Rockbund Art Museum, Shanghai, 2012.
This work was based on a performance that took place at the Rockbund Art Museum in Shanghai. Images captured by the museum’s video surveillance system have been mixed with some sequences where Gao Bo is testing in his workshop. The voice modified by a slowing effect is that of the artist reciting the poem he wrote, entitled “Thus Spoken Laostist”. Gao Bo organized an auction of the concept of this work, which was purchased by a private collector.
Laostiste manifesto
28 October 2011, 7 pm, in situ, Rockbund Art Museum, Shanghai.
The Eternity of being lost, live work n°1.
The artist GB applied an improved photographic emulsion of his invention (safe, non-corrosive, pH neutral) to the skin of models to fix photographic images on their bodies, before rinsing them to immediately erase them. This work was done simultaneously with the in situ auction of the work. The work consists of four processes: the realization of the work in situ, its temporary conservation, its erasure and finally its sale and entry into a collection. Reincarnation of the artist through visual language, GB created her as an offering to life and vanities. What collectors collect is a pure “feeling”, a pure “sensation” (an intangible work of art). In the tradition of Eastern philosophy, form is emptiness, and emptiness is form.
Transformation, village of Shangyuan, Beijing, 2012.
Triptych Video, Running time: 04’24’’, 16/9.