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 the mountains of her native Shandong Province, 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.

Occasional flashes of purple, rose madder, paler pinks and viridian green illuminate the objects and figures that are the focus of the artist’s attention.

When I visited Gao Ping’s studio for the first time, many years ago, the first thing I noticed was the heady, intoxicating fumes of oil paint. Then my attention shifted to the dark, brooding paintings stacked around the walls and laid out on the floor, and the piles of delicate ink paintings on xuanpaper.

In the centre of all this creative fervour was a gentle, quietly spoken woman. Her reticence seemed at first a strange contrast with her powerful 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.  She is, after all, a graduate of the prestigious, ruthlessly competitive Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing – a rigorously academic training ground that is not for the faint-hearted. There, Gao studied both Chinese painting and Western oil painting, and she is equally accomplished in both techniques.

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, whether created in oil and acrylic on canvas or ink on paper, reveal the notion of Chinese ink masters that black ink has the capacity for such subtle nuance that colour is unnecessary; changes in intensity and viscosity of the ink itself evokes the five traditional colours of red, indigo, yellow, white and black, which correspond to the five elements of fire, water, earth, air and metal. Even in Gao’s darkest, most brooding works, a sense of light and colour seeps through – although sometimes in a melancholy, bruised manner that recalls the canvases of another painter she admires, Marlene Dumas.

Gao’s oil and acrylic paintings are a palimpsest of washes, gestures and ghostly forms, combining the finely judged brush marks found in her ink painting with a range of experimental painterly techniques, and unorthodox combinations of materials. Thinned washes of acrylic are sometimes brushed over layers of Chinese ink, for example, in a process like a wax resist. There are moody, atmospheric glimpses of Beijing, its laneways, streets, courtyards and parks as if seen through dust, haze and fog.

There is also a quirky sense of humour evident in many works, a sense of the artist as a quietly amused observer of human foibles. Her watchful eye catches imperfect people in unguarded moments – awkwardly undressing, seated slumped at a bus stop or in a waiting room, or curled up in private relaxation. Similarly, the objects in her paintings are often quotidian things that others might overlook or ignore – a heater, water jugs, drooping pot plants, discarded shoes, wilting vegetables, sad abandoned toys, or stacked cardboard boxes waiting for the recycler.

I once asked Gao Ping about the particular experiences of women artists in China. She said:

You cannot change the time, or the country, or the age that you live in; you have to work within and influence that. You can change it through your work … Some female artists need to be strong, like warriors; some female artists are not like that and are in a situation that is changed by the times.’

‘Which kind of artist are you?’ I asked her.

Gao replied, laughing: ‘Sometimes the warrior kind!’

Dr Luise Guest, February 2025