Michael Gao

About

Michael Gao (he/him) is a Chinese painter currently working and residing in London. Gao paints to explore societal dynamics, identity, violence, and desire, contextualised within the shifting landscape of contemporary visual culture.

In his recent solo exhibition titled ‘Full Moons’ with Tuesday to Friday, Spain, Gao explores a fantastical realm where desire unfolds through the presence of hybrid creatures—figures that exist somewhere between the human and the animal. Gao’s works delve into this tension, echoing age-old rituals in which boundaries between species were blurred to transcend human limitations or to secure evolutionary advantages. Gao’s practice references ancient ritualistic traditions of transformation, such as the donning of animal fur to gain animalistic abilities, while inviting viewers to consider desire as a primal force—a drive central to survival, that could evoke mixed responses of pleasure or horror, cute or grotesque.

With reference to the modern furry culture, Gao reimagines the carnival as a post-Internet space. This in turn adds another layer through the juxtaposition of fantasy and reality, the familiar and the alien. Using meticulous airbrush techniques mixed with loose brushworks in oils, Gao creates photorealistic yet surreal compositions with flattened image planes. This flattening evokes a sense of claustrophobia, mirroring the tension and confinement inherent in digital spaces. In this body of work, the carnivalesque world becomes a lens to explore how, in the age of the internet, desire itself is both performative and ritualistic—a force that can connect or isolate, elevate or confine.