The hologram installation shows 40 seconds of a video loop depicting the action of a tongue licking the lips and biting the lower lip. The symbolic or metaphoric meaning of the licking lips show the double dimensions of the work. The licking and biting actions of the mouth symbolises the greediness of the capitalist developers’ desire. Meanwhile, the sensual action of licking the lips may trigger “individual passion and urges”. By inducing audience’s sensuous desire, there is something beyond the representation of the artwork, as a form of non-linguistic representation, which inspiring people’s sensitivity towards environment.” The intensified sensitivity and amplified sense of the alienation let people experience the subalternity affectively in my work.

More information please see here: Hologram Installation Emotional Encounter

For remembering the biggest fantasy of festive celebration at the end of pandemic year 2020.

This series of works was made during the festive celebration between Christmas and Chinese New Year in 2020. Facing the high death rate of the pandemic, the entire world was in terror and a devastating atmosphere because of the lockdown. I was staying far from my family and my home country, and I created a series of artworks, Intimate Fantasy. It deals with a series of complex feelings such as anxiety, depression, loneliness. The hope from the festive celebration is intertwined together with the erotic desire in the image, which aims to create a fantasy and imagined world where there is no repression, no virus, worries, terror or anxiety, people can touch and hug each other freely.

For more information please see: Intimate Fantasy

Time: December 1st -December 9th , 2022

Opening Hour: 10am-6pm Mon-Friday

Private View: December 8th, 6-9pm

Location: Battersea South Gallery, Battersea South Campus, Royal College of Art

Howie Street, London SW11 4AY

Battersea South Gallery, Battersea South Campus, Royal College of Art, Howie Street, London SW11 4AY

First major solo show of Chang Gao’s work in the UK, tracing her radical, diverse, transgressive, and interdisciplinary expression over eroticism and sexuality.

Intimate Fantasy is Chang Gao PhD VIVA degree exhibition examines her PhD research topic Using Supernormal Stimuli and Eroticism in creating public artworks: An Experiment in countering cultural hegemony and postcolonialism in Chinese public space. Her research topic overlaps interdisciplinary fields between psychology, philosophy, politics, and sexuality. Addressing urgent topics from sexual expression in comparison between eroticism and pornography, in combating political repression such as patriarchy, Euro-centric, Kantian sense of universality, colonialism, the hegemonic force of repression, censorship.

The exhibition will take place in and outside of Battersea South campus gallery at the Royal College of Art. The Private View will invite the audience to experience immersive and interactive experience for seven steps though multiple media across sculpture, robotics, ECG heart rate interactive installation, Augmented Reality interface, film, photography, Prints, hologram installation.

This exhibition is part of Chang Gao's PhD final submission in examining her practice-led PhD research at Royal College of Art.

More information please see:

Chang Gao Intimate Fantasy PhD VIVA Final Show

"The energy of the honey, the touch of the fingertips, sensuousness flowing my skin, warming your heart, and remaining in my dream. An erotic dream where the reality is repressed and fails to be represented, detached in this hegemonic and increasingly closed system of our world.”

“When I was thrown into the air and hit on the heavy splash of honey, the thickness of honey covered my whole body and licked every single corner of my skin. When I penetrate the silky surface of the honey, I feel I am transferred into another universe. A universe where allows my body to be coated by the freedom of sensuousness, a world which allows me to fly, to fall, to fantasise and to imagine."

Full film and more information please see: Film Erotic Proximity

The work Speaking for the Speechless invites viewers to send their political opinion via their device with no tracking of personal information – the information remains anonymous. By filtering the personal information, the piece allows each audience member’s point of view to be protected, while encouraging them to speak freely about their political opinions. In this sense, the work becomes the agency that speaks for people who are incapable of speaking in their own voice. My work is not simply speaking for them, or triggering erotic feelings, but also feeling for them. It creates a space for repressed feelings and dissonance to be allowed to exist, which are usually forbidden in the public space.

In this particular period of struggle against a global pandemic, Chinese and European governments employed completely opposite policies in terms of epidemic prevention. People in different cultural environments also have opposite attitudes towards treating epidemics and wearing masks, etc. The political, cultural and social difference gave me a great cultural shock. Public Intimacy is a double-solo exhibition created around individual experience in public space.

"Public gatherings" and "Public Intimacy" have become a contested concept during the outbreak. No matter whether it is to maintain "Social Distancing" in Europe or to obey the "curfew" in China, the relationship between individual and distance have become the primary concern.

The exhibition public Intimacy focuses on the ambiguity between the public space and private space. It explores and questions about the tension between the very personal matter of the human body and its relations to public space. It further examines the relations between humans, space and the sense of intimacy. The exhibition presents multiple media works using hologram installations, films, prints, interactive sculptures, and mixed media installations.

For more details please visit the exhibition website：

RCA News and Event: Chang Gao Public Intimacy

Public Intimacy focuses the ambiguity between the public space and private space. It explores the tension between the physiological response of the human body and its relations to public space. It exams the relations between humans, space and the sense of intimacy. The exhibition presents multiple media works using peppers ghost installations, films, prints, interactive sculptures and mixed media installations.

More info please see:

RCA News and Event: Chang Gao Public Intimacy

Chang Gao Double Solo Exhibition Public Intimacy

Hannah Arendt wrote, “the main objective of the public space is to bring us together and to restrain1 our individual passions and urges”. People are repressed from behaving freely in public space because the social norms and moral standards require people to follow social rules. By using the Augmented Reality technology within the urban environment of Victoria Station, the series Organic Access creates an opportunity for the public to encounter a moment that merges the public and the private, the virtual and the real.

The location I chose for Organic Access is Victoria Station. It is the place where the city landscape is marked by towering contradictions between the historical architecture and modern buildings. The city landscape itself has already created a strong contradiction, which usually creates a strong sense of alienation and cultural identity anxiety. By using the AR interactive technologies, the work will digitally project the sculptures and moving films onto the surface of the buildings or above the cities on the surface of buildings. By observing and interacting with a very slow movement of a tongue licking the lips, or a very slowly squeezed ketchup squeezer, the audience’s instinctive desire is provoked and released.

More information please see:

Augmented Reality Interface ++ Erotic Poetics

The artwork Book of Disquiet combines the audience’s heartrate, artworks and performance in public space. It explores the tension between the very personal matters of the human body and its relation to public space. The tension that sexuality is suppressed in public space, as the way Chinese government suppress people to speak out their political opinions. It inquires whether the personal and collective experience are able to address the cultural hegemony and postcolonial phenomenon in Chinese public space.

The artwork Book of Disquiet moves and shakes in different ways according to the heart rate of different spectators in responding to the surrounding environment. Although the physiological response cannot represent people’s conscious opinions, the registration of subtle but fundamental affection can produce non-symbolic representations which express Spivak’s subalterns, the class who are incapable of enforcing their class interest in their own name.

More information please see here:

ECG Heart Rate Interactive Installation: Book of Disquiet