by Aias Christofis
In the ceaselessly transmutative art oeuvre of Gao Yuan, an ouroboric and almost corporeally charged dialectic unfolds between flesh and terrain; an uncanny, destabilizing metamorphosis through which the vulnerable epidermal surface of the human body dilates, calcifies, and mutates into a desolate, estranged landscape, while these alien terrains themselves seem to petrify into sculptural scarifications of an embodied identity in perpetual alteration. Trained in Taiwan and the United States, Yuan’s practice articulates a hybridized aesthetic in which photography, video, and sculpture converge into a single mutational continuum: her ostensibly flat, two-dimensional photographic surfaces do not remain inert but instead convulse, swell, and erupt outward, acquiring a kind of 3-dimensionality as they force themselves into our presence; an existence that occupies space with the insistence of something bodily, mineral, and newly hatched.
In her early monochrome studies of tattooed bodies, Gao Yuan evokes the estrangement technique of ostranenie, reminiscent of the Russian Formalist theorists and visual artists such as Shklovsky and Eisenstein, through which the once-familiar body is rendered unrecognizable, transmuted into an alien, quasi-geological topography whose markings read less as tattoos than as tectonic fissures upon a living stone-surface, compelling the viewer to confront both self and otherness in an otherworldly and unfamiliar spectrality. In this way, Yuan embodies a philosophical sensibility steeped in Taoist paradox: the tattooed body as both void and plenitude, an aperture of emptiness and simultaneous fullness. This uncanny calligraphy of fossilized flesh invokes a meditative interplay of form and emptiness —a śūnyatā not of serene dissolution, but of visceral potentiality— in which inscription becomes petrification, and petrification becomes the ground of a defamiliarized mode of embodiment.
In her later landscape works, Gao Yuan’s practice evolves into tactile photo-sculpture: a hybrid of two-dimensional photography and three-dimensional form. These photographic prints of textures are layered, cut, folded, and rearranged into sculptural objects. Her engagement with landscape draws, at a subterranean level, upon the Manual of the Mustard Seed Garden, that encyclopaedic codification of pictorial ontology through which Qing-dynasty painters articulated the morphogenesis of mountains, mists, and vegetal forms. Here, the manual’s taxonomies undergo a kind of somatic transduction; the ink-surface territories coagulate into calligraphic eruptions, and sculptural protrusions pulse with the same energetic principle that once guided the rendering of rocks or cloud swells. What emerges is a mutated, almost bio-calligraphic vocabulary in which classical aesthetics are not merely reinterpreted but re-enfleshed; their once-serene diagrams propelled into a tactile, estranged, and telluric domain where these bodily landscapes no longer mirror one another but fuse into a single, continuously reconfiguring organism. The viewer might observe an unknown vista, but actually witnesses a geomorphological body.
Similarly, Gao Yuan’s videographic practice operates as a spectral choreography in which estranged skin, unstable territory, and mutating identity are folded into a single, oscillating field of forces, where the body is not simply filmed, but activated as a site of inscription, trauma, and psycho-geographic flux. The human body rebels as a living palimpsest: a trembling stratum of overwritten histories, capturing the micro-convulsions of Oneness. For example, Gao Yuan’s video artwork titled Ci’Ke unfolds as a somatic mythography in which a tattooed body on a desolate shoreline becomes the central conduit through which personal identity, historical violence, and territorial memory are made to resonate. Ci’Ke —meaning both a tattooed figure (or “marked one”) and assassin— ritualistically recasts the moving human body into a living geological formation, a body rendered porous to wind, water, and sediment. Filmed against the relentless breathing of the sea, the inked skin functions simultaneously as epidermal script and eroded terrain.
Within the broader constellation of Taiwanese contemporary art, Yuan’s practice uniquely occupies a liminal position: she operates outside the island’s dominant aesthetic bifurcation between, on the one hand, synchronous electronic–digital idioms aligned with Taiwan’s technoscientific industries, and, on the other, the linear, manga-inflected visual vernacular embraced by younger artists. Instead, her art remains insistently tethered to the tactile, the somatic, and the material, articulating an aesthetic vocabulary that neither retreats into nostalgic traditionalism nor capitulates to techno-futurist acceleration. This rootedness, however, is never static. It is profoundly shaped by Taiwan’s intricate ethnic palimpsest —the interwoven genealogies of Austronesian Indigenous communities, Hakka settlers, and later migratory currents— that generate an unstable cultural geology through which identity is continually renegotiated.
In this sense, Gao Yuan’s practice performs a Deleuzian deterritorialization of flesh and ground: the body liquefies into terrain, terrain recoils into skin, and identity melts down and then is torn loose from any stable cartography. What remains is a state of perpetual becoming; a quivering interval where histories surge without hardening into origin, and where the self is no longer anchored in lineage or land, but suspended within the restless, porous volatility of its own transforming surface.
