The art of Gao Ludi goes hand in glove with his reflections on the condition of our times. By rethinking the culture of “the image” (tuxiang) in a contemporary context, he links the practice of painting to an exceptional kind of physical activity of which the principal function is to deal with “residual stuff”. This is the main channel for the transmission of images. To a large extent, social media influence the most basic ways in which images are generated. The daily, disciplined sharing of individual information by the masses has incrementally added physical meaning to the image, allowing it to depart from the mere domain of aesthetics and spread out into the physical domain. Keywords here are “daily”, “high frequency” and “disciplined”. The artist departs from readily available, unprocessed original images, subjecting their everyday aesthetic to tongue-in-cheek analysis and misappropriation. Hence, the artist’s works don’t just operate within the complex history of painting and photography in the modern and contemporary age: their physicality also envelops them with a kind of fluorescent halo.
