Michael Gao: Salt Land

Mandy Zhang Art is pleased to present Salt Land, the first solo exhibition with the gallery by represented artist Michael Gao, curated by Joséphine May Bailey. About Across twelve new paintings, Gao explores solitude as both refuge and isolation, conjuring a beautiful yet quietly inhospitable world of lighthouses, distant seas and solitary dogs. Drawing on a short story written by the artist, the exhibition considers the desire to withdraw from the world—and what we find in the spaces we create for ourselves. Michael Gao (b. 2002, Beijing, China) is a painter living and working in London. He explores social dynamics, identity, violence and desire, placing these themes in the ever-changing context of contemporary visual culture. Gao casts domesticated animals as a counterpoint to human tension — a figure of primal detachment amid socially coded behaviour. He uses fine airbrush techniques combined with loose oil brushstrokes to create realistic yet surreal compositions, flattening the space to evoke a sense of claustrophobia. With the subtle staging of dominance, threat, or exclusion, he subverts the expectation of violence and instead uses the animal as a strange mirror: instinctively present, yet curiously disconnected from the drama we choreograph around it. Using animal and human imagery, Gao reimagines carnival as a post-internet space. This setting further deepens the contrast between reality and fantasy, the familiar and the alien. In this series of works, the carnival world becomes a lens to explore how desire has become performative and ritualistic in the Internet age — it can both connect people and isolate them, both elevate and constrain them.