Gao Mingyan

City Golf

In City Golf the artist Gao Mingyan films himself playing 18 “holes” of golf throughout the mega-city of Shanghai. For each hole, Gao traveled to significant places from his memory—his first school, his childhood playground, and his former date hangouts—and proceeded to play a makeshift round of golf at each location. In revisiting locales from his youth, Gao attempts to forge a linear connection between all the important places that comprise a life’s experience, his performative “passing” through each location poetically referencing his own passage through time. Gao’s project, however, raises deeper questions about transgression. In order to construct these temporary “holes,” Gao has to willingly subvert how these locations function as public sites, a significant intervention of private will into a communal space in a country, China, where the tensions between private/public are decidedly political.