Gelatin silver bromide print, paint emulsion, ink, pastel and bandage on fabric with neon lettering.
Since the early 2000s, Gao Bo has been using photographic material he produced in Tibet over a period of almost twenty years, reinterpreting it and constantly extending it.
Over the years, the artist has explored the practice of photography via increasingly spectacular installations, expanding the frontiers of the medium. In Disappearing Figure – III, Gao Bo returns to twelve early Tibetan portraits, reworked in ink and assembled into a huge wall panel, each topped with a neon light covered in gauze. These neon lights bear mysterious inscriptions in an alphabet invented by Gao Bo, at the frontiers of Chinese, Latin and Tibetan writing systems. This phantom writing is one of the artist’s tools, with which he explores the limits of language while at the same time escaping any restrictive interpretation of his work. The process invites us on an impossible quest to decipher it: a reading without end. At the same time, the work appears to be doubly veiled: first by the ink that almost completely covers the original photograph, then by the strips of gauze wrapping the neon lights. Gao Bo records the twofold movement of the subject’s disappearance and refuses to explain the work in a one-dimensional way, creating a piece that is fuelled by profound melancholy and which seems able to touch infinity.