Gao Weigang

Suspended from the ceiling in a darkened room of Gao Weigang’s first solo exhibition in Hong Kong, a large golden jackhammer tilts downwards. A viewer’s presence stimulates a sensor in the room, and the drill point starts to turn slowly, glinting as it catches the light. The quiet movement acts as the winding key to a music box within the installation, which plays a recognizable though distorted rendition of Pachelbel’s Canon. This work, titled New World (all works 2015), is both menacing and alluring—the jackhammer’s destructive power contends with the vintage toy’s associations of bygone innocence.

Themes of nostalgia, mystery, and the absurd are also present in the eleven other works on display. Struggler 6, for example, from a series of oil-on-stainless-steel paintings that lends the exhibition its rather Sisyphean name, depicts a snowcapped mountain with a metallic sound wave spiking across the foreground. The artist created the effect by painting over a sticker in the shape of the wave, which is then removed to reveal the stainless steel underneath. Gao has deliberately not disclosed what the sound wave represents, in order to emphasize the work’s ambiguity. The artist’s lively subversion continues in Where, a two-dimensional stainless-steel and titanium sculpture of a spiral stairway leading nowhere, set against a cobalt-blue wall. This trompe l’oeil staircase has been a recurrent motif in Gao’s work, and its illusion of ascent is unsettling but transfixing. Therein lies a metaphor, perhaps, for modern China, its claim to a new world order, and those who would struggle against it.