Inkjet print on pH neutral paper, artist’s blood, writing by the artiste and by Gelie Lama, 75 x 56cm. 148 unique pieces, with DVD.
This series stands apart in the work of Gao Bo, being more akin to “traditional” photographic practice than the monumental installations he has produced in recent years. It nevertheless reflects the same desire for experimentation and the same wish to return to original photographs to extract the purest truth from them. Using this feeling of unfinishedness as a starting point, Gao Bo turned his attention to about a hundred of his own photos of Tibet exactly ten years after they were taken, covering the prints with his own blood and writing on them using a fictional alphabet that becomes both the signature of the artist and a universal language. This is not so much a sacrifice as an offering that reinforces the symbolic charge of the invented language, conceived by the artist with the help of Tibetan Buddhist monks, in particular Gelie Lama. Gao Bo highlights the limits of language, attempting as he does so to step beyond the non-communicability of his experience in Tibet and asserting through his work, in the words of the philosopher Jean-Louis Chrétien, that “beauty is a wound”.