Article | Michael Gao: Carnival and Animality

In The 120 Days of Sodom, Michael Gao’s painting responds to the exhibition’s central concerns through a hybrid state of carnival and disorder. The figures that inhabit his canvases often hover between animality and human form, resisting stable identification with any single species or identity. They appear as momentary captures—ephemeral presences marked by exaggerated gestures, heightened sensoriality, and subtly distorted bodily proportions—locked into confrontations within the pictorial field.

Installation view of 120 Days of Sodom, Jan. 10, 2026 - Mar. 8, 2026, Nan Ke Gallery, Shanghai, ©Courtesy of Nan Ke Gallery, Photographed by Runxin.

The emergence of these figures is closely tied to contemporary visual experience. Michael Gao does not shy away from modes of seeing shaped by the digital age. The planar treatments, immediacy, and overstimulated visual intensity familiar from screens, game interfaces, and online imagery are absorbed into the structural conditions of his painting. Bodies are stretched and compressed; spatial relationships flatten, yet retain a pronounced physicality. This approach situates his work within a sensibility akin to a post-Internet condition, in which images respond less to reality itself than to the ways reality is viewed, consumed, and amplified.

Michael Gao

Sneaking Out Before Dessert, 2025

Acrylic on canvas

70h x 60w cm

©Courtesy of the artist

Within this framework, the animal figures take on an increasingly carnivalesque charge. They echo the carnival tradition’s temporary inversion of order, where high and low, reason and impulse, civilization and instinct coexist within the same visual register. The body becomes a vessel for desire and excess, pushed toward states of overabundance, grotesquerie, and occasional violence. This is not chaos in the absence of structure, but a loss of control unfolding from within it—like a pack of wolves howling at the full moon. Carnival, after all, can only exist through the presence of order.

Installation view of 120 Days of Sodom, Jan. 10, 2026 - Mar. 8, 2026, Nan Ke Gallery, Shanghai, ©Courtesy of Nan Ke Gallery, Photographed by Runxin.

In painterly terms, Michael Gao’s work maintains a clear affinity with the looseness and immediacy associated with Neo–Neo-Expressionism. Emotion is not concealed but spills directly onto the surface through color, gesture, and bodily deformation. Painting abandons the closed composition and instead operates as a continuously active site, allowing contradiction, instability, and excess to coexist. Animality functions here as a method rather than a metaphor, returning the body to its role as the primary site of perception and action.

Within the context of The 120 Days of Sodom, where classical paradigms are pushed to extremes and mobilized as stages for power, desire, and regulation, Michael Gao’s paintings register as internal noise. Amid the surging, carnivalesque imagery, animals, bodies, and affects take center stage. It is precisely through this excess and imbalance that painting briefly slips free from regulated modes of viewing, revealing a form of freedom that accommodates contemporary anxiety and desire alike.