ENG

Gao Lan began her artistic career around 2015. She trained at the Brera Academy of Fine Arts, where she pursued specialized studies, selecting practices and languages ​​closest to her research. Her early works can already be traced back to an identity-based poetics, whose core focus revolves around the relationship between her identity and her surrounding environment. From her earliest works, she introduced elements of rigor and discipline into an artistic practice grounded in technical and formal specializations. For Gao Lan, beyond external technique, the foundation of her poetics lies in an understanding of the interior, which simultaneously indicates the mind, heart, and conscience of the individual.

Her works are capable of creating the territory of her conceptual vision, establishing new structures and new bonds of belonging, revealing new possibilities: they address the great themes of art, such as representation, language, identity, time, belonging, and solitude. Gao Lan’s reasons are “mental” reasons; hers is not an indication of excessive experimentalism, but rather the coherent contribution to a single central and almost obsessive idea, a series of experiences aimed at a precise goal. In reality, Gao Lan is a restless, meditative, intensely lyrical artist, aware of the intimacy of her every gesture, of a truth in making. The space of representation is the common denominator of a series of her works, in which art is essentially an activity that creates meaning. But unlike the conceptual artists of the 1970s, Gao has not distanced herself from “traditional” painting, but has opted for an impact of optical illusion. Reacting to the personality cult (of contemporary art), Gao decides to operate within the realm of art, shifting the focus of his work to a strictly intellectual dimension by emphasizing the linguistic aspect of art. The work thus becomes an investigation into the way in which its meaning is manifested, and this investigative practice raises a series of questions related to representation.

The uniqueness and value of Gao Lan’s thought are expressed in the precise balance between the conceptual rigor of a research that sees the process of painting as its foundational element and the manual nature of this practice, made the protagonist of the work together with writing, highlighting the different elements of a research that, in its apparent simplicity, takes on the aspect of a ritual of vision. A classic rite, governed by a semantic code absolute in its obsessive precision: the representation of time. Each of Gao Lan’s works belongs to a continuum, and in her work, without the diversity between one work and another being immediately evident, a phenomenal reality emerges that appears di erent in itself. It happens, work after work, that time comes to deny itself, to dissolve into the work, as if the absolute of language, to which Gao Lan refers, does not allow itself to be represented.
The discovery of this omnipotent metaphor becomes a poetics that encompasses both emotional and intellectual dimensions, defining the dramatic relationship between the artist’s life and the work process, between the physical-personal and metaphorical-spiritual temporal dimensions. This indicates the artist’s ethical decision to dedicate her artistic practice to a single, great work.
Gao Lan’s commitment, aimed at total concentration on the essential, is based on ethical principles and a sense of responsibility towards others. This fundamentally ethical implication of artistic practice demonstrates the radicality that materializes in the poetic totality of the metaphor.

It is a highly concentrated, extremely intense, uncompromising experience of perfection and complexity, of an adventurous essentiality, which is comprehensible precisely through a radical perfection, an uncompromising essentiality. The artistic dimension implies, for Gao Lan, the most extreme, radical, and intense concentration on the essential, on authenticity, which
art focuses on in a very specific context.
For Gao Lan, art is linked to the aspiration to perfection, to unlimited creation, beyond any compromise. Her artistic practice seems to be far removed from all conventional structures; its rigor is the paradigm of an artistic position that can no longer be interpreted within the limited and narrow perspective of the dialogue between East and West, but rather within the unlimited context of art.
Gao Lan’s works speak to the birth of absolute tautology, a window onto nothingness as access to an unknown, invisible, intangible reality, a reality beyond reality, a place that, not being part of everyday life, offers the possibility of imagining the eternal, the infinite, the whole. Gao Lan’s pictorial gesture is evident, it hides nothing, and it is this evidence—the evidence of the material, of the gesture, of the process—that clarifies the close dialectical relationship she has established with an “other” dimension, the infinite, the cosmos, the eternal… the nothing.

Gao draws the viewer to the “edge of visibility.” All of his work oscillates between the polarities of the material and the absolute tension between form and formlessness, presence and absence, fullness and emptiness, light and shadow, time and eternity, immanence and transcendence, physics and metaphysics, finiteness and infinity, between the visible and the invisible. And all this because he works dialectically and simultaneously with the opposite poles of the finite and the infinite.

A territory, hers, located in the interstices of reality. It is the need to annul one’s own psychological being, one’s own experience, to allow the energy of a flow to emerge, seeking to become itself void, silent, immaterial, present yet absent.
In Zen philosophy, matter is no different from emptiness, emptiness is no different from matter: matter is precisely emptiness; emptiness is precisely matter. Thus, Gao Lan’s work brings the infinite into the finite.
Gao Lan seems to have a need for silence, as a sign of a further vision of poetry. Far from the noise of the world, Gao Lan’s silence has become material; all of Gao’s work thrives on absence and silence; the reality of each of her works begins beyond what is visible.

Francesca Alfano Miglietti