“Her reticence seemed at first a strange contrast with the strength of her oil and acrylic paintings, but over time I came to see that this apparently paradoxical juxtaposition of strength and fragility is a key to understanding Gao’s work. Beneath the darkest shadows is a lightness of spirit.”

‘… I love you as certain dark things are to be loved,

in secret, between the shadow and the soul.’ (Pablo Neruda, Sonnet XVII, 1959)

A casual visitor to Gao Ping’s Beijing studio would receive the impression of a surrounding darkness. Many of her canvases are layered in sooty blacks and greys, or deep browns. They evoke the darkness of a winter evening under lowering clouds that obscure the moon, deep shadows cast by mountains, or by the grey walls surrounding the courtyards of Beijing’s traditional (and sadly, mostly demolished) hutong neighbourhoods. Yet on closer examination the careful observer will see the light that seeps through these shadowy layers of painterly washes. There are flashes of rose madder, softer pinks, and viridian green that illuminate the objects and figures that are the focus of Gao Ping’s attention. 

Gao Ping admires the early Qing Dynasty painter Ba Da Shenren, who famously observed that there were ‘more tears than ink’ in his paintings. His expressive landscapes achieve a balance between stillness, space and closely observed detail, which Gao returns to again and again. Her own works reveal the notion of Chinese ink masters that black ink has the capacity for such subtle nuance that colour is unnecessary; the change in intensity and viscosity of the ink equals five colours. Yet even in Gao’s darkest, most brooding works, a sense of light and colour seeps through. 

In 2011 I visited Gao Ping for the first time. When I walked into the studio that she shared with her husband, the artist Yong Li, I first noticed the heady intoxicating fumes of oil paint, and then the dark, brooding paintings stacked around the walls and laid out on the floor. In the centre of all this creative fervour was a gentle, quietly spoken woman. Her reticence seemed at first a strange contrast with the strength of her oil and acrylic paintings, but over time I came to see that this apparently paradoxical juxtaposition of strength and fragility is a key to understanding Gao’s work.  

Beneath the darkest shadows is a lightness of spirit.

Dr Luise Guest

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