The paintings of Er Tai Gao and Maya Gao resemble unearthed relics, their surfaces pitted and chipped by the centuries. But they have been cleverly tempered, abraded by the Gaos to suggest time's ravages. The rustication also hints at the depredations the artists themselves have endured.
The eight paintings on display until mid-November at the Paseo Verde Library in Henderson were executed in the spirit of the Buddhist cave paintings of Dunhuang, China. Er Tai Gao studied the ancient devotional murals and sculptures that are found along the Silk Road, the trading route which once linked China with the West. But Gao's time for research, writing and painting was severely crimped by the Chinese-Communist government that sent him to a "re-education" labor camp for intimating that beauty is subjective. After several arrests over the years, Gao fled his native land in 1992, and his wife, Maya, followed soon after. The Gaos reside here courtesy of the City of Asylum program, run by the International Institute of Modern Letters and the International Parliament of Writers. Er Tai Gao is the second writer lodged in Las Vegas, the only City of Asylum in the United States.
I cannot pretend to interpret these paintings, which are grounded in a theology and an art history I only limitedly understand. Dunhuang was a western outpost of the Tang Dynasty, and an entry point to China for Buddhist monks from the west who stopped there to learn the language and culture and translate Buddhists texts. A complex of cave temples in the area was built and decorated over a millennium, roughly from the fourth to the 14th centuries.
The Gaos' paintings do not replicate specific cave paintings, but rather invoke their spirit and appearance. "Votaress," by Er Tai Gao, depicts a seated, rouge-cheeked woman holding a flower. As in the show's other paintings, the tones are subtle and faint, but the image still seems to glow under the lights. It also betrays an Indian, or at least central Asian, influence, that is not surprising given the caves' frontier influences.
But you need little knowledge of these contexts to appreciate the paintings. "Bright Moon Over the Pass," also by Er Tai Gao, is painted on a composite board that has been worn at the edges. Delicately varied layers of undulating black and gray depict ridge lines at once receding into hazy distance and swelling into peaks, with a region of pale cream intimating the moon in the upper left.
Maya Gao proves herself capable of similarly sinuous lines in "Three Female Maras," a trio of upright figures that are densely substantial, but nonetheless seem as if they might unravel like wisps of smoke. Her "Buddha," four vertical, scroll-like paintings, each of a single figure, has a similar feel of being both material and provisional.
Er Tai Gao's "Offering Lotus Apsara," a winged, haloed spirit that displays in its hands a garnet blossom, appears all the more dreamlike for its loosely limned, almost incorporeal, depiction. The rustication gives it an even more delicate air. His "Luxurious Pines" and "Buddhist" are calligraphic works, but not in the expressive spirit of the Chinese "literati" tradition. Rather, they read as characters long ago brushed onto a wall and eroded.
In the autumn 2000 edition of the journal Autodafe, Er Tai Gao wrote On the Obligation to Smile in Chinese Work Camps. He describes propaganda posters recalling, with unintentional irony, venerable calligraphic styles. And he imagines his fellow inmates, running and smiling in their labors, "buried and turned into fossils," to be pondered by future civilizations.
"No one could explain these strange symbols," he concludes.
Those without a Buddhist background might feel the same way about Er Tai Gao and Maya Gao's paintings, but none would doubt the power of these mysterious artifacts, pulled not from the ground but from two long-buried souls.