Mixed media including: inkjet prints, writing and drawing made by the woman in the photograph, neon, readymade violin and fishnet stockings, artificial hair, metal cables and slate on an old stool, 90 x 90 x 80 cm, in eight pieces. Medical reports on the woman who collaborated in the work.
Micro-Polyphony is an intimate, silent tribute to the artist’s muse and friend Zhou Jin, who suffers from cancer. Inspired by Man Ray, Gao Bo symbolises the female body by a series of violins wrapped in red neon reminiscent of radiation. Each violin is wrapped in a fishnet stocking, then placed on a photo of Zhou Jin naked, taken before she fell ill. The installation, which is truly polyphonic, also features drawings by Zhou Jin and notes taken during her illness. The gentle drawings, the sensuous photographs, and the humour of these feminised violins contrast starkly with the harsh excerpts from the medical report and the X-rays opposite them. And yet all these elements respond to one another: the same woman’s body, the same red iridescence that seems to come from the contrasts between black and white, and the same confusion when faced with the self-evidence of death. All the avatars of this unveiled body, shot through with light, both evoke the fragility of life and achieve its transfiguration into an artwork.