Tang Contemporary Art is pleased to announce that it will launch post-90s Chinese- American artist Gao Hang’s first solo exhibition in China, titled“Screen Life Drawing” at its Beijing Headquarters Gallery Space on April 19, 2025. The exhibition, curated by Fiona Lu, features Gao Hang’s latest paintings. Through his innovative adaptation of early 3D modeling, low-poly aesthetics, and spray-paint techniques, Gao constructs an artistic field where the virtual and the real devour each other, forcing the audience to confront the existential truths reconstructed by algorithms.

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The theme of the exhibition, “Screen Life Drawing,” is a satirical reworking of traditional sketching methodologies, implying a sharp criticism of media dominance. Taking Jean Baudrillard’s concept of the “hyperreal” as a pivot, the exhibition transforms the cognitive dilemmas of the digital age into a compelling visual experiment. The electronic screen has become the new landscape and a new ready-made object, implicitly revealing the exhibition’s core theme: a humorous yet profound examination of people's saturated “real” experiences in today’s digital age. In Zebra Study, the juxtaposition of the rough 3D models and sketch marks draws the audience into a cognitive paradox of the virtual life drawing scene: the zebra’s stiff posture is both a parody of early video game AI and a deconstruction of the human visual mechanism. The technical flaws of digital images become new aesthetic objects, and the “reality” pursued by traditional life drawing dissolves within algorithmic filters. This dislocation reveals the existential dilemma of digital natives: their visual experiences have been restructured by data models, the boundary between the real and the virtual has been blurred into a chaotic flow of perception through interface interaction.

The politics of color field has evolved into a micro-theater in Two Good Looking Asians. The three-color domains divided by hard-edge polylines constitute an allegory of identity: the black color domain symbolizes the marginalized groups silenced by the algorithm, the red and black stripes are a metaphor for the visual violence of capital logic, while the dominant skin color block exposes the aesthetic hegemony of “de-differentiation”. The textural differences created by the spray gun—the flat, the electronic, and the hybrid chaotic states—correspond to the stratified domination of digital technology over human perception, deconstructing the essentialist imagination of “Asian” as a cultural symbol.

To Be a Better Man and The Great Questioning Generation directly confront the mental symptoms of the digital age. The absurd dialogue between the comical figures against a fluorescent green background and the motivational titles reveals the performative nature of existence in the social media era. When “self-improvement” is alienated into a KPI competition for data laborers, the carnival of virtual identity exposes the hollowing out of existential meaning. Meanwhile, the young person with neon pink hair’s deconstructive questioning of de Kooning forms a time-space war between digital natives and the modernist tradition: in the era of algorithm and information overload, the legitimacy of knowledge authority is being reconstructed by the flood of data.

The painting-installation works Surprised Again and AMMO! immerse the audience in a cognitive violence experience. The FPS scene at the end of a closed corridor awakens deep gaming memories, which not only include operational skills but also the internalization of value systems. When the audience instinctively seeks cover, they are experiencing the typical symptoms of digital survival, internalizing the rules of the virtual world into real-world coping strategies.

Gao Hang’s works ultimately point to Baudrillard’s prophecy of the “the carnival of simulation”: in the era of algorithmic dominance, “reality” has become a continuous process of production of symbolic system. The rough modeling of the zebra, the abstract brushstrokes of de Kooning, the visual violence of fluorescent colors, as well as the chaotic motion of the spray gun, together, constitute a scalpel that deconstructs the concept of “reality”. “Screen Life Drawing” is not a critique of reality, but a deconstruction of the critique itself. Within the cognitive framework of digital natives, “reality” has long become a concept variable that needs to be redefined. Gao Hang’s artistic expression of cognitive revolution makes the exhibition a visual codebook for decoding digital civilization, exposing the deep anxiety of the technological age through humor and absurdity.