Houston-based artist Gao Hang just opened his first solo show in China, and it’s a full-on collision of video game nostalgia, digital anxiety, and hyper-colored critique. Titled Screen Life Drawing, the show is now live at Tang Contemporary in Beijing and flips the idea of traditional figure drawing on its head, replacing live models with polygon-style characters straight out of early 3D animation.
Gao’s signature style is all here: neon pastels, low-res forms, and compositions that feel like they were paused mid-render. But behind the playful visuals is something sharper, a reflection of the filtered, screen-first reality we’re all living in. Whether he’s skewering workplace hierarchy in Your Boss and Your Boss’ Boss or poking at self-image in Two Good Looking Asians, Gao’s work reads like satire for the scroll generation.
The show’s curated by Fiona Lu and leans into that Baudrillard hyperreality idea where everything looks real, but nothing quite is. The result is a series that feels funny at first glance, then kind of unsettling the longer you look. It’s as much about what it means to draw from life now as it is about the lives we perform online.
