Gao Lei was born in 1980 in Changsha, China. He graduated from the Central Academy of Fine Arts (CAFA) with a degree in Digital Media. Gao is an artist of a new generation specializing in telling stories with his creations. Deliberately withdrawing colors and emotions from the works, he puts focus on the compatibility and co-figuration among the daily objects, in an attempt to translate and express what he actually has in mind. Through the removal of functional properties of daily objects, Gao highlights their genuine property of the coldness, cleverness, convergence and extreme simplicity. He then further rebuilds the conflicting relationships between the order and chaos resulting from the objects. His creations, at first glance, do not reveal excessive emotions and exaggerating visual impacts; however, with careful contemplation, it is hard not to notice the sharp confrontations hidden in them.
Using what he has encountered and the personal growth he has experienced, Gao transforms and ‘folds’ the intrinsic and disordered emotional impact into an unprecedented and unusual neat space, where he undergoes the internal retrospection and makes external statement. There is an obvious and essential ‘psychological’ difference between the exposition space he creates and the visual space in traditional painting. For example, the spaces he creates all possess a conservative character, which casts a spell that traps viewers’ attention and then brings up the extraordinary feeling of being spied on. Gao is used to introducing a strong resistance to daily routines and doubts about future trends. With his depiction of all kinds of distinctive objects and events, on the one hand, he highlights the distortions, imbalance, and division caused by the rapid development of the society; on the other hand, he prompts the viewers to reexamine and evaluate the different standards applied among us and the world.