GAO YUAN

In this group of acrylic paintings on paper, Gao Yuan constructs interior spaces with such precision and detail that they seem less imagined than remembered. They must be real rooms, inhabited by real people, or so the viewer infers. Cat bowls tucked beneath a cabinet, iodine swabsticks left on the coffee table, paint stains accumulated on the easel, an ashtray by the computer overflown with a bouquet of cigarette butts... Every trace of use and care gestures toward the absent dweller. The allure of lived-in spaces lies precisely in what they reveal about their occupants’ routines and temperaments. As the eye lingers over each merticulously rendered detail, the people who once moved through these rooms, and the stories they carried with them, begin to surface in the mind.

Detail conjures a sense of reality; repetition constructs the dimension of time. The same rooms recur across multiple works, depicted from shifting perspectives, at varying distances, and in changing times of day. Objects altered ever so slightly, shadows rising and receding, colour relationships rearranged... Familiar spaces we linger in day after day are constantly shapeshifting through human intervention and the passing of hours. Rather than meeting the works all at once upon the wall, viewers encounter them gradually as they unfold across custom-built wooden structures throughout the gallery. The paintings rest on changing planes, interlaced and offset, inviting viewers not simply to look, but to meander–to peer across gaps, turn back, and double-take. Rooms, plants, windows and vistas reappear like déjà vu from a half-remembered dream, or the sudden flash of memory that arrives unbidden.

The vivid traces of habitation suggest the presence of characters, while the recurrence of scenes across day and night intimates the passage of time. If characters’ actions across time constitute a story, in this body of work action is left outside the frames, and therefore narrative is both promised and withheld, suspended in a state of poised potential.

A clue to this suspended storytelling lies in the storyboards displayed within the wooden vitrine. They are drawn for Gao Yuan’s ongoing feature-length animated film Cloud of the Unknown; the acrylic paintings serve as the film’s backgrounds, rendered painstakingly frame by frame. The only work in the exhibition that depicts a non-domestic space, Cinema (2025), reads almost as a double entendre. It is at once a scene from the film itself and a quiet nod to the theatricality nature of all the works on view.

Visually lush yet emotionally restrained, these paintings offer just enough of a hint to sparkle the imagination—to suggest stories about to unfold, or perhaps already concluded. Where the performance never quite begins, the empty stage becomes the drama–one that beckons, unsettles, and lingers.