The Lonely Horizon—Gao Minglu during the 1970s,” an exhibition of work by Gao Minglu will take place from June 13, 2015 at the Linda Gallery, located in Beijing’s 798 Art District.
Currently a professor at the University of Pittsburgh, Gao Minglu is a foremost contemporary Chinese art historian and critic, as well as a central organizer and spiritual leader of China’s New Wave art movement during the 1980s. Not unlike many of his Chinese peers, he did not begin his career specializing in art research, but rather as an artist. This not only relates to his personal experiences, but is also integrative with China’s social history and developments in academic discourse.

Throughout the 1970s, Gao Minglu created hundreds of watercolor works, line drawings and oil paintings. These works are not only bearers of aesthetic ideals and interests, but even more so, serve as comprehensive documentation of this decade of his life. This large body of work paints an exemplarily portrait, a lonely horizon, which is not only an expansive microcosm of the sparsely populated grasslands of Inner Mongolia, but perhaps even more significantly, a period of history which strengthened the character of Gao Minglu; silent, tenacious, accepting, withstanding, and always faithfully standing at the forefront. From another angle, this partly explains his reasoning in turning away from working as an artist clearly influenced by Soviet-styles and emerging as an avant-garde art critic, reflecting Chinese social as well as cultural developmental discourse. For this reason, the subject matter of this exhibition functions as a fundamental temporal thread, connecting seven sections, “Youthful Ambitions,” “Prairie Years,” “Ulanqab Landscapes,” “Teachers, Students and Friends,” “Impressions of the City,” “Tracing the Long March,” and “Towards ’85.” These seven sections, culminating in close to 100 works, are exhibited alongside Gao Minglu’s own personal sketchbooks, art historical writings, manuscripts and pictorial documents, presenting the audience with an extraordinary history and unique human condition.