Gao Hang gets really close up to video game characters, then paints them

Plenty of artists like video games. But when I ask Gao Hang about this interest in the context of his art, he assures me it’s more of an impulse than a reference. “As a kid, I remember the shock I felt when I first encountered video games. It’s [this] shock I experienced from the digital world that continually draws me.” Gao has to make art that describes that shocking feeling again and again, he says. Like the compulsion many have to turn a PlayStation back on, but with airbrush. “It’s not a complicated impulse: when I was a kid I had to draw dinosaurs everyday, and now it’s this.”

It’s true that Gao Hang has been doing this for a while. When we spoke to the Houston-based artist in 2021, video game explorations were a common theme, alongside memes and colour fields. Now, in the lead up to a new exhibition at Pulpo Gallery, You See? You Are Also Simulated, the through line has never been clearer.

That’s not to say the linework is too. Airbrush has been a favoured medium for years, but this time, he’s cropping so close onto objects that face and form are lost almost entirely to the mapping rendering flaws you’ll find on most early 2000s video games – maybe you’ll make out an ear, if you’re lucky. Gao has always liked the “ridiculousness” of these flaws, and how it proves the human hand in gaming development.

“I think I have been practising zooming in on game characters since 2016 when I was in a graduate program,” he says. “I would then stare at my screen for a long time. As I approach, the details lose clarity, the ‘fine’ becomes ‘raw’.”

In comparison to previous works, which occasionally depicted entire scenes, Gao has dialled up his gestural approach. Like Alex Katz, a major inspiration, Gao focuses on painting a motion – he captures both himself, as he plays the video game, and the characters he interacts with on screen. The flaws in the rendering give the characters he depicts a strange, sad personality; sometimes their features come away entirely as they sink into one blurry digital landscape.

Another big inspiration for Gao is his experiences with social media, and how the internet “reformed” our behaviours and valuation system. When Gao describes the internet, he says, “I am in it, I am excited about it, and most importantly, I am scared of it”. Perhaps this uncertainty is part of the reason Gao continues with his impulse with games and airbrush. “As I am painting and abstracting the digital space, I am visually shifting away from its original context,” he says. This reframing, just like his desire to paint, is unstoppable and “irreversible”, he says. “Just like getting old.”