Mixed media including old wooden buckets found at antique fairs, white books in plaster, telescriptor displaying world stock exchange prices, telescriptor displaying text by the artist: ‘Thus Spoken Laostist’. Variable size.
Gao Bo places his art within the framework of a permanent investigation of the values governing both contemporary society and his own work.
The triptych entitled Falling Values presents the three poles between which he believes creation takes place: aesthetics, self-awareness and society. Not without a degree of irony, Gao Bo’s portrait is flanked by those of Mao and the Mona Lisa, each wrapped in its “Holy Shroud”, making up a new Trinity of creation. In parallel, in Unveiling– New Auschwitz, Gao Bo appropriates Christian iconography to present a literal crucifix of values where all forms of knowledge cower before the totemic god of money.
On a pile of books and traditional Chinese seals symbolising the former Imperial unit of measurement, the “dou”, stands a large cross on which stock market prices are displayed in real time, as well as the poem “Thus Spake Laostist” by Gao Bo. Criticising the narrow rationalism of a world dominated by money, the artist develops his creative manifesto adopting the tone of Nietzche’s Zarathustra, in the form of an ode to freedom and a certain form of productive aimlessness. The neologism “Laostist”, invented by Gao Bo, combines the name Lao Tse with the English word “lost”. Gao Bo’s entire body of work proceeds from this loss, this disappearance, which is never sterile but which, on the contrary, appears as the necessary condition for creation.