Tibet 1985-1995. Offerings.
Xavier Barral| N° d'inventaire | 22123 |
| Format | 17.5 x 24 |
| Détails | 291 p., cloth bound. |
| Publication | Paris, 2017 |
| Etat | Nine |
| ISBN | 9782365111324 |
Closer to a "traditional" photographic practice than the monumental installations to which he has devoted himself in recent years, we nevertheless find the same willingness to experiment, the same desire to return to the first shots to extract the purest truth. Exactly ten years after they were taken, Gao Bo once again looked at his photos of Tibet, rediscovering them and proposing new formal associations that disregard chronology. Then, during the summer of 2009, he returned to Tibet, taking his recently assembled images with him, and he began to rework them using his blood as ink and an automatic calligraphy that he called "language of the soul." This invented photography, conceived by the artist with the help of Tibetan Buddhist monks, draws a fictional alphabet through the images, nourished by varied typographies, which becomes his signature as well as a universal language. This gesture highlights the limits of language, and thereby attempts to overcome the incommunicability of his experience in Tibet. For the artist, it is less a sacrifice than an offering that reinforces the symbolic weight of this invented language. Born in 1964 in the Sichuan province of China, Gao Bo discovered his vocation after a first trip to Tibet in 1985, where he produced a series of portraits of striking mastery. A graduate of the Institute of Fine Arts at Tsinghua University (Beijing) in 1987, he moved to France in 1990 and became a member of the Vu agency. Since 2009, he has lived and worked in Beijing. Gao Bo shapes his work, at the borders of photography, installation, and performance. Very quickly, nourished as much by the precepts of Marcel Duchamp as by the thought of Lao Tzu, Gao Bo felt the limits of his photographic practice and began a process of questioning and reinvention around his work. Using the photographic material produced during his first trips to Tibet, he took his prints and covered them with ink, paint and his own blood. Over the years, the artist's interventions on the photographs became more and more extreme and flirted with performance, going so far as to completely burn a series of portraits of prisoners condemned to death to collect the ashes.
Closer to a "traditional" photographic practice than the monumental installations to which he has devoted himself in recent years, we nevertheless find the same willingness to experiment, the same desire to return to the first shots to extract the purest truth. Exactly ten years after they were taken, Gao Bo once again looked at his photos of Tibet, rediscovering them and proposing new formal associations that disregard chronology. Then, during the summer of 2009, he returned to Tibet, taking his recently assembled images with him, and he began to rework them using his blood as ink and an automatic calligraphy that he called "language of the soul." This invented photography, conceived by the artist with the help of Tibetan Buddhist monks, draws a fictional alphabet through the images, nourished by varied typographies, which becomes his signature as well as a universal language. This gesture highlights the limits of language, and thereby attempts to overcome the incommunicability of his experience in Tibet. For the artist, it is less a sacrifice than an offering that reinforces the symbolic weight of this invented language. Born in 1964 in the Sichuan province of China, Gao Bo discovered his vocation after a first trip to Tibet in 1985, where he produced a series of portraits of striking mastery. A graduate of the Institute of Fine Arts at Tsinghua University (Beijing) in 1987, he moved to France in 1990 and became a member of the Vu agency. Since 2009, he has lived and worked in Beijing. Gao Bo shapes his work, at the borders of photography, installation, and performance. Very quickly, nourished as much by the precepts of Marcel Duchamp as by the thought of Lao Tzu, Gao Bo felt the limits of his photographic practice and began a process of questioning and reinvention around his work. Using the photographic material produced during his first trips to Tibet, he took his prints and covered them with ink, paint and his own blood. Over the years, the artist's interventions on the photographs became more and more extreme and flirted with performance, going so far as to completely burn a series of portraits of prisoners condemned to death to collect the ashes.