Gao Xiaowu, a Chinese contemporary artist, presented his latest work Future Standard (The Strangers) during the 60th Venice Biennale in 2024, continued the lineage of his "Standard Age" series of sculptures and incorporating more of his diverse and avant-garde artistic practices in the exhibition. Gao Xiaowu's work Future Standard is not only the summary of his "Standard Age" series of sculpture in the past 20 years, but also happens to be a microcosm of Chinese contemporary figurative sculpture responding to the development of global contemporary art. In 1980, Georg Baselitz, one of the most important artists of the time, took his wooden sculpture with one arm raised to the 39th Venice Biennale, and his event marked the revival of figurative sculpture in Western modern art after the sculpture movement with abstract as the trend. Therefore, it is particularly important to review and analyze Gao Xiaowu's "Standard Age" series of works at this opportune moment, and then to examine and discern his artistic concepts in a multi-dimensional cultural time and space perspective.
Gao Xiaowu's "Mortal Art"
In brief, Gao Xiaowu practiced a new art "standard" - Mortal Art, by means of deconstructing the standard. Mortal art can be traced back 20 years to 2004, at the time, when Gao Xiaowu first created Standard Age, a sculpture of a humorous crouching, bowing figure bowed at the waist with exaggerated figurative techniques. "Standard Age" was an instant hit since its released and soon became an object of many streets’ imitation world widely. Undoubtedly, this work has become widely loved by the public around the world over the past two decades, and it has been constantly imitated and even pirated in countless numbers, and it is gathered into the "Gao Xiaowu phenomenon”. As a result, The Standard Age is often interpreted as a landscape of global consumerism, which critics call "Kitsch". In fact, regardless of the various interpretations of the "Gao Xiaowu Phenomenon", as an artist who never stops working, Gao Xiaowu is diligently practicing a "standard" that is not quite the same as the existing global contemporary art "standard”.
From the appearance , Gao Xiaowu's "Mortal Art" is characterized by following features: "Popularity” in the format, which often uses concrete objects from daily life as imitations; "Universality" of the content often takes the common phenomenon that ordinary people can feel as an example; The "exaggeration" in the expression, which mostly uses humorous and playful gestures as the characteristic paradigm. These representations of "Mortal Art" are consistent with some "standards" of the global contemporary art system dominated by the West, which makes the interpretation of "mortal art" usually the same. E.H. Gombrich said, "There really is no such thing as art. There are only artists." The interpretation and analysis of "Mortal Art" requires a precisely looking at the standardized concept of art, combined with Gao Xiaowu's creative process of "Mortal Art" itself, to look at the surface and understand the inner meaning in multiple dimension.
Mortal Art vs. Pop Art
It seems that the understanding of "Mortal Art" can easily be covered or replaced by the artistic concepts with the right to speak such as "Pop Art". Base on the fact that both "Mortal Art" and "Pop Art" are trying to fill the gap between art and life with a new artistic language. Under the sweep of global consumerism, neither "Pop Art" nor "Mortal Art" can escape the dissolution of "Aura", mechanical reproduction seems to be an unavoidable historical fate. From the Renaissance to the contemporary society, the imitation of symbols has completed three stages of evolution from "imitation" to "production" and then to "simulacrum". Just as "simulacrum" turns artworks into symbolic forms rather than objective reality, the everyday symbols are no longer separated from artistic symbols, but rather enter into endless "reproduction" and become standards.
The fundamental relationship between "Mortal Art" and "Pop Art", due to the fact that they are in similar stages of social development, therefore, resulting in similar artistic languages. Gao Xiaowu's "Standard Age" series of sculptures was conceived around the turn of the millennium, and official launched in Beijing, China, in 2004, at a time when Chinese economy began to soar, the process of urbanization was accelerating, the pace of globalization was advancing rapidly, and the wave of consumerism was also spreading strongly. Moving from the south to the north of China, Gao Xiaowu deeply felt the prosperity, joyfulness and peace of China's social development, but he also intuitively sensed the two sides of social development. The rapid development of society is accompanied by the emergence of more imprisoned "standards"; but at the same time, the "standards" also prompted the society into another dimension of development. Therefore, the artistic symbols created at the beginning of "Mortal Art" seem to be ordinary and common, the thinking of this "standards" are swallowed by a wider range of "standards."; as a result of the pervasiveness of "simulacrum”, and a large number of poor imitations of "Mortal Art" once again became mainstream, and becoming the "Gao Xiaowu Phenomenon”. The proliferation of "simulacrua" makes it possible to interpret "Mortal Art" in one of two ways. One is under the hat of a Warhol's kitsch characteristics, participating in the carnival of popular culture; the other is seen as full of cynicism, ironically engaging in cultural critique.
In fact, unlike the binary interpretation of "Pop Art" as either "kitsch" or "cynicism". The emergence of "Mortal Art" is more about Gao Xiaowu's personal speculation as an artist, he has no intention to follow the pace of "Pop Art", but he has keenly discovered a social problem -the increased number of standards are emerging in the society, and the proposal of this problem is open to the public. Whether "standards" are good or bad, worthy of praiseworthy or critical? Gao Xiaowu deftly suspends this question, and the way he interprets the questions raised itself dynamic - the artist provides a space for interpretation, allowing him to continually deliberate on this issue, and laying the groundwork for the public to participate in the discussion at the same time. From this point of view, the discussion of "standard" "mortal art" precisely presents the characteristics of "non-standard art", while "Pop Art" is a kind of "standard art". However, it can also be recognized that “Pop Art” and “Mortal Art” are either overlapping and combining, or diverging and contradicting, which is the paradoxical scene of this era full of harmonies and contradictions.
Globalization vs Localization
Strictly speaking, the use of "Pop Art" to define "Mortal Art" may have unconsciously entered into a kind of art writing standard, as the evaluation criteria used in contemporary art are basically derived from the Western art language system. The aphasia theory in the field Chinese contemporary art theory has been controversial from the very beginning, which results Chinese literary critics and theorists are unable to define the work of contemporary Chinese artists. As a matter of fact, this is an essentially a problem of globalization. From the perspective of the flat theory of globalization, the world, has been constructed as a single system, and there is no escape for artistic language and standards.
However, it is quite obviously that interprets "Mortal Art" from the one-side "globalization" is inadequate. Globally localized should be a more appropriate analytical tool to interpretg its artistic language, the tension between "globalization" and "localization" has reached a hybrid relationship. From Gao Xiaowu’s focus on sculpture are, the early Chinese figurative sculpture art is very different from the Western sculpture style. Chinese sculpture emphasizes on the expression, freehand style and the pursuit of charm, while the Western sculpture tends to focus on reproduce, imitation, and the pursuit of realism. Gao Xiaowu comprehends the similarities and differences between Chinese and Western sculpture very well. He graduated from the Sculpture Department of Xiamen academy of Arts and Design, Fuzhou university in Fujian Province, he underwent strict training in sculpture and acquired a thorough knowledge of Western sculptural modelling. Then he went to the Sculpture Department of the Central Academy of Fine Arts for further study, he learnt from Hua Tianyou, the founder of modern Chinese sculpture, used the "Six Canons of Art1" to elaborate the rules of western and Chinese sculpture.
In his practice , Gao Xiaowu is able to integrate and adapt his sculpture, and he is not confined to the sculpture techniques and formal styles that he has mastered. He gives full play to his subjective sense of creativity and gives full play to "locality" of his personal characteristics. The series of "Standard Age", a representative series of "Mortal Art", originates from Gao Xiaowu’s impact on the lives of ordinary “mortal” people after witnessing the rapid social transformation in Fujian, a region at the forefront of China's economic development, and regards himself as one of the "mortals". With his own perception, and his observation of the commonalities of all "mortals" standardized by society, The "ordinary" joy, helplessness, humility, self-deprecation and other embarrassment state is refined into a classic "Gao’s style smile”, the shape is concise, the large-scale simplification and the focal details are well depicted. Therefore, although the sculptural form displayed in the "Standard Age" series seems to be Western, its core is Chinese, and Gao Xiaowu focuses on the spiritual temperament of people instead of pursuing the precise proportions of the human body, which is quite the meaning of "forgetting the form when one has got the spirit" contained in Chinese art.
Growing up in Fujian, Gao Xiaowu was deeply influenced by traditional folk culture, and then he began to consciously studying Zen culture, he realized the essence of life is the present moment. Therefore, He is good at capturing the "present moment” and refining it into his own artistic language. The understanding of Zen culture makes Gao Xiaowu have a philosophical attitude towards life. Through the experience of intuitive imagery, he transcends the difference between the conceptual levels of matter and consciousness, and connects the universe, the world, and the "origin" of life into one. We can draw a conclusion that the "present moment" is the result of Gao Xiaowu's "advantage" to experience wisdom, and the "Standard Age" series of works is his expression as a metaphor to explain this wisdom, which determines that the "standard" at the beginning of the intention is dialectical and open, and the new work Future Standard launched in 2024, Just proves the dimension and breadth of this thinking: Gao Xiaowu focus his attention on the unknown future where the high development of science and technology will produce more illusions, how to define or interpret the "future standard", and whether mankind is already deconstructed and reconstructed the concept of "human" itself? Gao Xiaowu generated a lot of thoughts and reveries about the future of "strangeness", and by inviting the public participation and discussion through performance art, he ultimately generated multiple answers with the Zen wisdom of "metaphysical existence and metaphysical non-existence"; This kind of contemplation and discernment through art is also in line with the dialectic of the Western philosopher, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel. This proves that as an artist, Gao Xiaowu has fully carried out subjective and active thinking and practice in the process of globally localized, and has found a harmony between "globalization" and "localization".
Copyleft vs Copyright
Undoubtedly, "globalization" has rapidly accelerated the dissolution of the "Aura". Mechanical reproduction has made it easy to reproduce artworks on a large scale, this phenomenon can also be seen in the global popularity of Gao Xiaowu's "Standard Age" series of sculpture. As a matter of fact, reproduction has given the possibility of democratized artistry, breaking down the barrier between the elite and the public, and change the public's aesthetic experience on artworks, transforming the public's original static and single way of appreciation into a dynamic and diversified mode of acceptance. The birth and development of "Mortal Art" is a testament to the changes of this era: Art works is shifting from the hallowed halls to a normal daily life, just like sculptures whose bases are removed, and their functions are no longer to be worshipped in a ritualised manner, and the original sacredness of art works is diluted; Art is now infiltrated into every corner of daily life because of the rapid development and dissemination of mass media. In this way, more "mortals" are enabled to participate in the construction of social culture.
Therefore, the initial nature of "Mortal Art" is accompanied by democratic and popular qualities, which coincides with Gao Xiaowu's original intention of creation. In other words, the audience and participants of "Mortal Art" are supposed to be diverse and wide-ranging. In practice, however, along with widely spread of works, "Mortal Art" is inevitably involved in another area of concern, namely the piracy and copyright infringement issue. From the point of view of the characteristics of "Mortal Art", the reason why "Mortal Art" can be close to "mortals" is that Gao Xiaowu, as an artist, has given it the core of "Copyleft" in his creative thinking. This has continued into his work Future Standard in 2024, the latest of which is complemented by performance art that invites a wider public participation. Compared to "Copyright", "Copyleft" is derived from a freer view of copyright, which intended to encourage the public to participate and to share their works.
However, in the age of mechanical reproduction, it is the inevitable result that “Mortal Art” encounters difficulties in the process of dissemination. On one hand, Gao Xiaowu created the original works of the "Standard Age" series with a unique feature, a distinctive style and a clear expression while the mechanical reproductions scattered all over the world have eroded the authenticity of the artworks. On the other hand, the various works named themselves with "Standard Age" that sells on the market are just parodies that are not even considerable to be mechanical reproductions. Those poor imitations not only diminish the audience's appreciation and experience of the artwork, but also exceed the boundaries of the legal protection of "copyright". In fact, "Copyright" and "Copyleft" are just two sides of the same coin, both of which essentially design to protect human creativity, thereby, stimulating more equal opportunities for creativity. Even the nature of "Copyleft" seemingly more liberal, it is not in its essence to recognize the waiver of copyright, which constitutes its two basic conditions, one is the recognition of copyright, and the other is that the right holder must obtain the right given up by the license, but must also comply with the provisions of the license to exercise.
From the perspective of the intervention of "mortal art" in the copyright issue, it also illustrates the breadth and depth of its extension. It is precisely because "mortal art" has the characteristics of subjective and objective integration into social life, it is able to combine with various industries, stimulate a variety of possibilities as a driving force for social production, both actively and passively.
Sculpture in art vs Social Sculpture
"Mortal Art" shows a vivid vitality in it process of development; it concerns time to times with the issues of the day. Take the "Standard Age" series as an example, Gao Xiaowu created Standard Age in 2004, Post Standard Age in 2008 and British Standard in 2013, all of which continue the same modelling pattern and are all presented in the form of sculpture.
Among all the plastic arts, sculpture is the most multidimensional expressive category, and at the same time, it is also the style of art that is most dependent on material, medium and skills. Artists need to acquire a high level of ability to express their thoughts through long-term training and practicing. At the same time, the material or the medium has a strong artistic binding force on the sculpture, and the direction restricts the aesthetic trend of the work. As a contemporary artist, Gao Xiaowu who treats sculpture with rigor manner, and his tireless pursuit of artistic "standards" is another reflection of his proposition of "standards". Through his research and understanding of different materials, he has also gained a different perspective on the materials themselves. The first draft of the "Standard Age" series sculpture is made of clay, followed by different materials such as glass reinforced plastic, cast copper, and cast copper with color, etc. Gao Xiaowu chooses different materials for different works depends on the sites and location of the work. The different characteristics of the materials objectively set a "standard" for Gao Xiaowu's sculpture technique, and thus he continues to think practically about the issue of "standard" in the process of sculpture creation.
In 2024, twenty years after Gao Xiaowu’s first released of Standards Age, he created a new work, Future Standard (Stranger), which continued his dynamic reflection on the issue. In terms of modelling, Gao Xiaowu followed his classic schema of the "Standard Age" series sculpture, and was still a smiling bowing man, but this creation, he turned his eyes to a broad domain with a more future vision, so this bowing man is a robot image with a strong sense of the future: The robot has a small antenna on top of its head, camera lenses in its eyes, a sensor nose, headphone cable and joints with a rotating shaft. In the previous "Standard Age" series, Gao Xiao mainly concerned about the perplexities of "mortals" in society, however, for this time his new work Future Standard (Stranger) is more about the fate of "mortals" in the whole earth. In a world of future technology, will humanity be collectively "defamiliarization"? As mentioned above, in the evolution of the "Standard Age" series, Gao Xiaowu's speculation on this issue has always been Zen meaning related, and the philosophical discourse behind "Mortal Art" is also characterized by "speak the words in double sentences ", "taking the right approach", and "coming and going as a result of each other", this shows the relationship between opposites and unity between things: Whether the future of human-machine unity is something to be longed for, or whether it is something that needs to be warned about, this is a question raised by Gao Xiaowu.
It can be said that the way Gao Xiaowu hopes to answer the question is to pose the question. The work Future Standard (Stranger) has evolved from a basic sculpture work, to a Site-Specific Art, or even to an installation art that can be travelled around. Then it evolves into participatory social activities that are supplemented with performance art such as parading "strangers" around the world with a sense of strangeness and searching for "strangers" with a torch, etc. This journey is not only the sublimation of "Mortal Art", but also the return. Gao Xiao-wu once again put "mortal art" into the public social context to allow it to generate new value demands. From the historical interpretation of art history, we can find that performance art was started in the 1960s, at the same when installation art was begun. This kind of historical coincidence is not accidental, but rather a result of changes in the development of art. We can compare Gao Xiaowu's "Mortal Art" with the "Social Sculpture" proposed by the German artist Joseph Beuys. The most important feature of "Social Sculpture" is that it can be widely participated by the society. It expands the responsibility of art, which is no longer to just artworks that can be appreciated by human beings, and the connotation behind "Social Sculpture" is Beuys’s concept “Life is a work of art, and life is art", and then he had a deduction "everyone is an artist." This humanistic concept of art coincided with Gao Xiaowu's "Mortal Art". Gao Xiaowu starts from the fundamental root of Chinese culture and interacts with ordinary people or “mortals” in the society, to find the way of how do ordinary people find Zen mechanisms. The so-called "people are like all", the extent of "Mortal Art" includes the act of inviting the public to participate in discussions on social issues together. In other words, although Gao Xiaowu never takes social criticism as his starting point, he is indeed an artist who cares about both artistic concepts and social significance.
The evolution of "mortal art" from sculpture to social sculpture itself also reflects the balance that "mortal art" has achieved in the self-discipline and heteronomy of art. On the one hand, it is the self-existence of art, and on the other hand, it is the connection between art and society. The dual nature behind "Mortal Art" is constantly presenting and evolving in all its artistic phenomena. Nicolas Bourriaud's central tenet in relational aesthetics refers to the way in which this artistic practice takes "the whole of human relations and their social context as the point of departure for its theory and practice." From the resolution of "copyright " to the exploration of the "strangers", “Mortal Art” interprets art through the production of relations outside the realm of art, thus generating a special fascination that goes far beyond the definition of art and this has created a special charm that is far beyond the definition of art.
Standardised vs. Non-standardised
When re-examining "Mortal Art" from the perspective of art intervening in society, Gao Xiaowu takes this opportunity to ponder a profound question “What will be the standard and how do people respond to it?” This question has changed along with the evolution of "Mortal Art," producing various answers under different times and spaces, in different filed, and among different groups of people.
Semantically speaking, the word "standard" itself can be interpretated into two different ways. Firstly, it can be explained as "a criterion for measuring things,” and secondly it is "an example or a norm", both of which point to the traditional view of order in logocentrism. The question raised by Gao Xiaowu is interesting when we examine "artistic standards" from the perspective of art history. From the Venus of Willendorf to the ceramic sculptures of the goddesses of the Red Mountain culture, from the huge and concise sculptures of seated figures in the temple of Abu Simbel in ancient Egypt to the pottery figurines beating drums and singing in the Eastern Han Dynasty, from the cave statues in Gandhara Art and Buddhist art to the African wood sculptures and South American Indian sculptures, each era has its own artistic standards.
However, reviewing on the surface, contemporary art itself has fallen into a "non-standard" fog, which is due to the fact that the essence or definition of art has shifted. Whether the question "What is art?", nor the concerned question of art essentialism "What kind of existence is art?", which is the concern of art ontology, the question of "how does art exist" has challenged the traditional and "standard" question. The aestheticians have focused on the issue of defining art, and they have formed different thoughts on " negative standard", "qualify standard" and "formulate standard". However, regardless of any method of their interpretations, they all coincide in re-standardization the reconstruction of "art".
It can be said that the construction of "Mortal Art" has, to a certain extent, also participated in the discussion of "Art Standards". The boundaries of "Mortal Art" also shows a dynamic process of continuous extension and internalization in its development. For one thing, "Mortal Art" continuously merges into social life, collides with various fields and stimulates various possibilities, becomes a driving force for social development both actively and passively. For another, "Mortal Art" also has rational thoughts and observations on the socialization of art, and it constantly discerns the direction of its development in its social practice, and prevent art turns into a tool that is manipulated by some kind of "standard".
Moreover, the "standards" that "mortal art" can participate in the discussion are also multi-dimensional - the reality of the society, AI technology, the future world, the natural environment, and philosophical insights, etc., those are areas that possible involved. As such, the standard initiated by "Mortal Art" is only to create an opportunity to communicate with the society, which is neither to explain society from theories or concepts, nor to find a unique solution to social problems, but to continuously open up the openness and freedom of society. The standard not only enables the artist to respond to the social field, but also enables the artist to create art through the viewers' participation in the art creation, both the artist and viewers joint together to shape the common value of " Mortal Art ".
At this point, I’m thinking an interesting phenomenon comes to my mind: During the 2024 Venice Biennale, as a viewer of "mortal art" myself, I participated in person in Gao Xiaowu's interactive activities of Future Standard (Stranger), and at that time I had an intuitive perception of his works in a "non-standardised" way; And now, while I am writing this article as an art critic, I will inevitably fall into a "standardised" way of art criticism. It seems that the speculation on "Mortal Art" should not only be confined within the text, but also should always be outside the text.
So, will future humans become more standardized or more deviant from standards? Is this a "Sisyphus-like" kind of thinking, or a kind of thinking of “A Thousand Plateaus” nomadic all kinds of strangers thinking, the future of the "Mortal Art" is still continuing.
Florence, 30 April 2024