How to elevate the already alienated objects of everyday life into sacred icons through painting? When making these paintings, Gao references the compositions of the Gothic stained-glass windows. In order to transform the painted subjects into symbols infused with a sense of rituality, his process features two crucial steps: the creation of frameworks and the filling-in of said frameworks. This process echoes his previous approach in creating his ready-made installations, where Gao would devise a framework to represent the structure of the societal power system, then filling it with daily objects belonging to different social hierarchies. The artist first outlines the framework of power (the icon) with thick paint, allowing the form to raise above the canvas like a low relief. The embossed effect recalls the traditional technique of “gelled patterning and gilding,” which was used to heighten the authority of the Buddha in the Ming-Dynasty frescos inside the Faihai Temple. After completing the framework, Gao uses the syringe—a symbol for the highest order of power and a recurring element in his past installations and photography—as the sole tool (the brush) to fill in the colors. It is a process no less laborious and time-consuming than the creation of a mandala: propelled by the external pressure inserted on the syringe, the acrylic paints become metaphors for the human bodies, each of a different class and identity. The colors are being mixed and carried away by the forces of commerce, politics, and religion, eventually injected into the different areas within the framework of power.

This process of constructing the frame and inject the paint also resembles the artist’s attempt at self-control and punishment, a reenactment of the coloring exercises during childhood art classes.

The "Beyond the Cave" series of paintings is inspired by the unique geographical and historical backdrop of the Beiqiu Museum of Contemporary Art, built against the mountains in the Nanjing urban area. Within the museum, a section of the cave-like, dimly lit tunnel, transformed from an air-raid shelter, serves as the physical setting for these artworks. The artist leverages such authentic cave space and the internal undulating terrain to create a collection of paintings that draw on the structural framework of Gothic stained-glass windows and the filling rituals of mandala sand paintings, seemingly sculpting luminous cave openings of various shapes in the darkness. The foreground of these pieces features a set of human portraits, rendered material, and trapped within a digital simulacrum made up of electronic screens, social networks, and AI—a modern-day reflection of Plato's Cave. Meanwhile, the background reveals the real world outside the cave, symbolized as "Beyond the Cave."