Gao Xiang the Dreamer
Giorgio Morandi, the Italian painter, who not unlike his Chinese counterpart Chang Yu, instilled his still lifes with a strange, unreal feeling, a sort of Taoist paleness and sense of the illusory. Giorgio Morandi was almost Chinese in his Zen-like practice of oil, using the oil as sparsely as ink, and infusing his works with a deep calm, a perception of the void. Dreamers all! Perhaps one day soon, we will discover how to sidestep into a parallel universe, to jump from one plane of reality to another, to slip from one century to the next, from one geographical location to the next, from the ghostly world to the real world. Scientists ensconced underground in the Hadron collider watching fast-moving particles collide are now trying to prove Einstein’s theories that parallel universes exist and that we may even be RQO\D¿QJHUDZD\IURPWKHQH[WZRUOGRUXQLYHUVH7KH7DRLVWV like the Greeks, have always believed that the earthly world is mirrored in the underground world or in the heavens. Gao Xiang’s dream series makes the world of dreams and the physical world collide. A man lies beneath a tiger, dreaming on a white snow slope. A woman looks down from the stars at a man holding a water buffalo. A horse gallops through the red sky and the constellations. A little red man dances atop a huge white horse. Another stands astride a pagoda of horses, piled one on top of the other. This cannot be real. It must be a dream. But we feel it could be happening. The soul of the dream tiger and the man could be one.
“All that we see or seem is but a dream within a dream.” ——Edgar Allan Poe
“I dream my painting and I paint my dream.”
——Vincent van Gogh
The first time I met Gao Xiang, he was transfixed by a kaleidoscope painting by Damien Hirst, the spheres made of EXWWHUÀ\ZLQJVGHSLFWLQJ3V\FKHRUWKHVRXODWWKH),$&LQ3DULV This meeting was perhaps meant to be symbolic. Symbolism is as important to Gao Xiang as the Surrealist idea of "hasard objectif" is to me. It was no coincidence that we met each other. Of all the Chinese painters I have met and I have met more than a few, Gao Xiang is the one most obsessed by dreams. Perhaps, fellow dreamers are meant to meet like butterflies on a gust of wind, all part of an ephemeral world that seems so unreal that it might disappear. As Zhuangzi might have said: Am I dreaming of WKHEXWWHUÀ\"2ULVWKHEXWWHUÀ\GUHDPLQJRIPH" When one gets to know Gao Xiang better, one senses there is a deep yearning in him, a desire to escape into another world, a world hinging on our own, the dream world, the parallel universe. One can sense, that for Gao Xiang, only the world of painting truly exists.
A student at China's best-known art academy, the Central Academy of Fine Arts, Gao Xiang wrote his doctoral thesis on
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