Gao Xiaowu has left me with an impression that he always keeps a smiley face. He has been welcome very often by his fellows, which is just like the Chinese notion “One’s face tells one’s heart”. His sculptural work is stylish, humorous and exaggerated. The warm smiley faces embedded in his work are very classical.
　　The comedy unveiled when the white-collar workers standing in Beijing’s Jianwai SoHo, bowed with a wide smile in the work Standardization Age. Gao Xiaowu thus entered the central zone through his expression in terms of contemporary art creativities as well, which has been widely accepted and recognized by the art circle. The work Standardization Age materialized the worldwide infiltration of standardized services after globalization took place. The standardized services as such are necessarily costly, just like the feelings a viewer has evoked through reading his work: laughs, however, with a sense of helplessness. The work City Dream depicting the smiley and chubby angel is so much liked by many viewers. The image of a round body can not help its readers think of the inflating desires through eying those commercial ads floating in the air, but the thinker himself is indulged in helpless and uncontrolled desire for substance. His gigantic body in heavy weight with tiny wings eager to fly has created clashes between material and spirit, between ideal and reality in an attempt to showcase the subversive paranoia by his ironic and humourous expressions. It gives a flavor of cynicism.
　　If to say that the works titled Standardization Age and City Dream as signifiers of Gao Xiaowu’s “inward-oriented emotion” were started from his earlier creativities based at schooling, then turned into contemplation on societal sculpture, his later works Our Generation and All Asleep thus signify his transition in expression into “youngster’s mood”, a cognition and contemplation towards a generation of future fashion and of cartoon and animation. The meaning of cartoon and animation lies in inspiring and reviving the imagination of a human being, completely throwing away the spiritual rubbish remains of contemporary art left in history, and targeting the future. The conceptual metaphor and cartoon images embedded in Gao’s work have a strong preference and full of characters one can find in this era of time. Time-washed detailing being shaped in and out of his work’s surfaces are filled and weakened with air, defining the historical rubbish remains in an ironical and joyful humor, reflected on an era that is full of sense of collectivity. In the work Our Generation, the artist has decided on using body language of adolescence rather than an exaggerated expression to highlight the dilemma of contemporary languages brought up by one’s own cultural roots and globalization under the governance of western discourse power. He intends to evoke a rethinking of the role of education his generation has received. In the work All Asleep, the images in rich colours were depicted in a method of paranoia, showcasing the detailing of different situations of people from a great variety of social classes, i.e., the image of one’s head surrounded by lots of meaningless saliva out of his or her mouth, which has constructed colourful clouds in a floating and dreamt way. Is it avid? Or indulged in the future? Or an avoidance to the present situation? The work All Asleep is a new mirror to depict the childlike China.
　　Gao Xiaowu was born in Datian, Fujian Province of China. Honesty and purity are two characters often found in his cultural and geographical background. The characteristics of nature and honesty popular in his birth place and of noise and restlessness in an urban life constructed a contrast, in which Gao Xiaowu has tried always to retain a balance between the two. One can tell from the title Our Generation that Gao Xiaowu has possessed a sense of self-identification which is differed from those artists born in the 1960s or 70s of last century. The artists born in those periods of time quite often felt unsure about their own identity, and one can often find a sense of “angry youth” in them. The artist rather focuses on the aesthetic needs and feelings of the new-generation artists born in the 1980s, his work revealed this rational thinking. Thus, the unique style the artist has developed through his work is mild but not rustic, showy but not cheesy. As of contemporary art renowned for its radical and critical nature, the fun shown through Gao’s work has let our viewers experience art by “swimming in the games of art” in a contemporary sense.
　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　Written by Hong Shunzhang
　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　in Daoist Garden, Beijing in spring 2008

作者：Hong,Shunzhang