Author: Gao Chang

Date: December 8th -December 16th 2022 Opening Hour: 10am-6pm Mon-Saturday Private View: December 8th, 6-9pm Location: Battersea South Gallery, Battersea South Studio Building, Royal College of Art, 24 Howie Street, London SW11 4AY First major solo show of Chang Gao’s work in the UK, tracing her radical, diverse, transgressive, and interdisciplinary expression over eroticism and sexuality. Intimate Fantasy is Chang Gao PhD VIVA degree exhibition examines her PhD research topic…

Book launch of ‘Representation’, an RCA Communiqué, produced by students and staff at the School of Arts and Humanities, Royal College of Art. Launch event in collaboration with Beaconsfield as part of ‘Monica Sjöö The time is NOW and it is overdue!’ 11 June-10 September 2022. With invited guests Kara Keeling (Prof. in Cinema and Media Studies, University of Chicago) and Atau Tanaka (performer and researcher in embodied musical interaction). Contributors to…

    Public Intimacy-Touch Me & Hug Me When social distancing becomes the new social norms in public space, touching and hugging become luxury social interaction during the pandemic and in the post-pandemic era. After one and half year of national lockdown, this series of work Public Intimacy: Touch me and Hug me aims to invite the viewers to hug and touch the artworks and compensate the lack of touching…

Public Intimacy-Feel Me In a hyper-digital world of post-pandemic era, where social distancing becomes the social normal in public space, the concept of public intimacy and sense of touch become luxury concepts. Art as a self-communicative language, this series of ongoing project Public Intimacy-Feel Me tries to build a self-connection between the artworks themselves in relation to the viewers. That self-connection shared is a measure of joy and playfulness which…

  Public Intimacy-Touch Me & Hug Me When social distancing become the social norms in public space, touching and hugging become luxury social interaction during the pandemic. After 1 year lockdown, couldn’t resist the impulse for making sculptures aiming for hugging and touching. Not big but satisfying. #Touchmeandhugme #sensousdesire #humanganitals #supernormalstimuli #studiowork #sculpting

In this particular period of struggle against a global pandemic, Chinese and European governments employed completely opposite policies in terms of epidemic prevention. People in different cultural environments also have opposite attitudes towards treating epidemics and wearing masks, etc. The political, cultural and social difference gave me a great cultural shock.  Public Intimacy is a double-solo exhibition created around individual experience in public space. “Public gatherings” and “Public Intimacy” have become…

Book of Disquiet 2020, plaster, 70x50x40cm   In the article Encounters with an-Art Thing, Jane Bennett refers to what Lambros Malafouris calls “material engagement,”. She writes that sometimes a nonhuman thing will become an extension of a human body and sometimes vice versa: “There are no fixed agentic roles in this game.”[1] The extension of the human body makes the audience’s body being captured and utilized, the “Utility Relation” is…

The artwork Book of Disquiet combines the audience’s heart rate, artworks and performance in public space. It explores the tension between the very personal matters of the human body and its relation to public space. The tension that sexuality is suppressed in public space, as the way Chinese government suppress people to speak out their political opinions. It inquires whether the personal and collective experience are able to address the cultural hegemony…