Gao Siyuan (b. 1987, Suzhou) approaches painting as if handling memory itself—fleeting, fragile, and luminous. Trained in animation at Shanghai University’s Film Academy and shaped by years as a concept artist in Shanghai, he returned to Suzhou in 2012 to leave behind commercial aesthetics and begin constructing a deeply personal visual language.
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Working primarily in egg tempera, a medium he favors for its immediacy and permanence, Siyuan has developed a unique technique that bridges pointillism and sfumato, blending finely stippled marks into soft, dissolving forms. His color palettes are distinct and intuitive, often yielding surfaces that shimmer between precision and a dreamlike quality. Conditions such as visual snow and tinnitus, which affect his perception, are not obstacles but integral to his process. They give rise to canvases that seem to breathe, delicate, atmospheric, and unresolved.
Drawing from family photographs, home videos, and the quiet poetry of everyday life, Siyuan transforms references into emotional landscapes. He describes his paintings as spiritual vessels, portals into inner terrain where memory, longing, and wonder gently converge.
Influenced by the austerity of Andrew Wyeth and the meditative emptiness of Hasegawa Tōhaku, Siyuan works with rare restraint. His compositions do not announce themselves. They linger. Each image is meticulously composed yet open to deviation, striking a measured balance between control and intuition.
Now based in Suzhou, Siyuan lives and works with monastic discipline. His practice is less an act of performance than one of preservation, a devotion to tenderness in a world that often forgets how to look slowly.