Introduction

Gao Jialu, born in 1996 in Shanghai, China, currently works and lives between New York and Shanghai. She received her Bachelor of Fine Arts from the School of Visual Arts in New York and her Master of Fine Arts from the Rhode Island School of Design.

Works are collected by institutions such as Long Museum and Yunjian Museum in Shanghai, and have been exhibited in New York and Shanghai. Her visual language blends the realms of the visual, spiritual, and symbolic, creating a distinct spiritual visual structure in contemporary art.

Gao Jialu’s practice focuses on abstract painting and the re-semantization of written symbols within contemporary art. By translating autonomous signs into pictorial language, she activates their structural potential through intuitive brushwork and composition, seeking connections between line, color, image, and universal themes. The contrasts and rhythms of color and line, along with the geometric forms they produce, generate a self-contained visual narrative. Through pared-down techniques and concise arrangements, she “dehistoricizes” these elements, releasing them from traditional burdens and allowing the work to achieve a purified, abstract clarity. This strategy highlights the open-ended nature of signifiers and situates abstraction within a phenomeno-logical field of perception.

At the same time, Gao situates her work in dialogue with spiritual philosophy and symbolic language, aiming to construct an imagistic system between perception, consciousness, and prayer. Symbols move freely across dense structures and modernist chromatic tensions, producing visionary images that are both poetic and spiritual. Abstracted, anthropomorphic faces reveal her humanistic concern, while unreadable signs function like musical notes, infusing painting with rhythm and resonance. These elements coalesce into evocative “messenger-images” that call forth both imagination and awareness. For Gao, painting is no longer confined to representation but becomes a methodology of “seeing as awareness,” positioning the act of viewing as a shared space where phenomenology and semiotics converge.

Selected exhibitions include: Autumn on Orchard,Van Der Plas Gallery, New York(2025); The Messenger: Toward the Unseen, Crossing Art, New York(2025); Easter, SGA, Shanghai(2023); Patterns,The Light Space & Time Art Museum, California(2021); Hong Man Tang Gallery 5th Anniversary Exhibition, Hong Man Tang Gallery, Shanghai(2018); Abundant Grace, Montserrat Contemporary Art Gallery, New York(2017); GaoJialu Art Exhibition, Hong Man Tang Gallery, Shanghai(2015)