Neo Jiapu Gao
Neo (Jiapu) Gao, born in Nei Mongol China, 1998. Manchu & Mongolian. Based between London and Beijing.
Neo (Jiapu) Gao is an art ethnographic researcher and paralleled practised as a transdisciplinary artist, his practices encompassed writing, sculpture, sound installation, moving images and performance. His artistic motives are usually cultivated by autobiographical poetic writing, where he may be self-empowered to re-narrate the identity politics and histories in archival objects. He collages the dislocated cultures of the foreign and the local through the lens of contemporary migrants, reproducing mythological transpositions and individual life narratives through various materials. His recent research focuses on pan-East Asian oral histories of migration, geo-ethnography, characteristics and changes in social noise in post-millennial.
Pepper Indulging, 2024
花椒梦, 2024
Audio Moving Image
8’22’’
Five Channels Video\Single Channel Audio
Director: Neo Gao
Photography: Neo Gao
Scriptwriter: Neo Gao
Video Editing: Neo Gao
Vocal：Chuan Sui
Performance：Muen Zhang
Sound production: Neo Gao
Found Material: “A Town by the Yangtze” (1950)
By Wan-go H.C. Weng
Courtesy to Artist & Changshu Library
"Peppercorns vex the bamboo mat's coolness, numbing my upper lip with sweat, the heat beneath the mosquito net, and the chicken coops at both ends of the dwelling"
— Pepper Indulging
The Alluvial Voice 2024
Moving imges\Sound installation
8’22’’
Five Channels Video\Single Channel Audio
AV monitors \ Hanging Printworks and Photography
Director: Neo Gao
Producer: Julian GuanXing, Neo Gao
Photography: Neo Gao, Leisan Zhu, Kiki Jing
Script clerk: Runfeng Qiu, Kiki Jing
Courtesy of Migration Family
Sponsored By DOCUMENTS闻献
The Alluvial Voice (2024) documents the lives of two generations of a Three Gorges migrant family on Chongming Island (Suburb of Shanghai) for two days and one night.
In the meantime, juxtapositing portraits and interviews of residents across the island, embedded with natural and social landscapes, provide a multi-scalar and multi-site portrayal of the ethnographical field research. It reflects the one kind of living conditions of domestic involuntary migrants in contemporary China, which explores the choices and unknown barriers of the residents when encountering Socio-Eco reconstruction.
By curating the moving images with symbolised geographical installation, it merged the alluvial features with the identities of the Three Gorges migrants through curatorial means, the work fuses the migrants' daily lives, identity symbols and environmental changes into the same context.
Through the metaphors of drift sands, depositions and Sichuan peppers (Local crops of Sichuan), the work narrates the characteristics of post-migration locals and the group's unique value that moves with socio-eco policy changes.
Frames from The Alluvial Voice (2024)
'Feeding ducks and crops they keep, strange soil that they till
As badong's wind whispers near, the western sails it did not hold
It turned to mud and dreams unfold
Open mouths tucking tongues, words unknown
The tabby cat calls and plays, in dancing white grass it sways.
River water calms the scales, knife fish gleam as light prevails.
Gentle glows on fishermen’s cheeks, but won’t free what's caught in nets that peak.
Whirlpools mix ancestral ash, night-grown sprouts get their first splash.
Mountain windmills spin around, pepper scents and sugar found.
In the sand they lay to rest, facing southwest, be blessed.'
Pepper Indulging, 2024
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