Judith Gao

BUZZ

Jackson's Art Prize 2024, Bankside Gallery 2024
Acrylic, Oil, Organic matter, Pastel
Canvas
80 x 70 cm

£1,870

“In my practice, an individual image may represent a word, a phrase or a moment, while a body of work becomes a poetic depiction of my experience in the world. Many of my paintings explore contemporary beauty standards and their relationship with queerness, internet culture and race. In the studio, I materialise what beauty looks like for a non-conforming and marginalised body, while rejecting the exoticized gaze. For the past two years, I have been creating fragmented images based on cultural references I am familiar with, also capturing real-life moments of mundaneness, humour, intimacy, displacement and nostalgia. Hair is one of the ongoing motifs in my work. BUZZ is made of my own hair, collected after giving myself a buzzcut in the bathroom.”