“By doing peaceful abstract painting, I hoped to counteract the anxiety and confusion that modern society creates in people.”
Born Jining City, Shandong, 1964
A Christian and a lifelong student of Chinese philosophers such as Confucius and Chuang-Tzu (Zhuangzi), Gao Ge—who is also an art professor—says his artistic practice is far more than a pastime: it is the source of his values and “the meaning of my life”. The Order series (2006 and 2007) forms a kind of diary; each painting took about one month to complete and recorded the artist’s “self-reflection”, he says. The large circular shapes, centred on squares of “cloudy dragon” paper, represent the ancient concept of “round heaven and square earth”: the limitless spiritual world and the limited human world, which depend on each other and are ultimately one. Expanding from a central, blurry core to a hazy rim, each circle is filled with countless short curves and flecks in different shades of the same, un-showy colour. Making these pieces was spiritually as well as technically demanding. For the artist it represented a kind of meditation, and doing that properly took enormous discipline and faith: “I had to stay calm and try to avoid any self-doubt. I wanted to search for a ‘pure spirit’ within me.”
