London-Based Artist Neo Jiapu Gao Debuts The Mimetic Game on the Street (Interview)

Opening soon in late August at Beijing’s 798 Art Zone, The Mimetic Game on the Street marks the debut solo exhibition of artist Neo Jiapu Gao. Drawing from personal memory, ethnographic observation, and digital encounters, Neo explores how street iconography acquires new symbolic resonance through imaging technologies like LiDAR. The exhibition examines urban space as an evolving archive of cultural traces, where personal perception and environmental data fold into one another.

The exhibition unpacks the layered spatial and temporal textures of street environments, treating them as evolving visual archives shaped by local memory and global circulation. Drawing on Deleuze’s notion of the fold, Neo treats the street as a dynamic interface between public and private, order and improvisation. Streetscapes are read not as fixed terrains, but as sites of negotiation, misreading, and reassembly. Through a hybrid methodology of embodied looking and speculative composition, the exhibition repositions minor visual residues—stickers, signage, graffiti—as poetic signals within a broader field of spatial memory. In doing so, it opens space for cross-cultural reflection on belonging, friction, and the aesthetics of everyday life.

Neo described his use of 'ratiocination'—a method coined by Edgar Allan Poe—as central to his practice. Rather than passively documenting street scenes, he approaches them as visual mysteries awaiting speculative reconstruction, imagining narratives behind these peculiar urban scenes. An abandoned toy left in the middle of a road, an eerie sticker on a street lamp, or some enigmatic phrases scrawled on a wall in a narrow alleyway. These seemingly trivial fragments serve as entry points into imagined genealogies—deductive acts not to solve crimes, but to trace cultural nuance and historical residue. For Neo, this speculative gaze becomes a method for sensing the micro-textures of place and the unspoken logics of everyday urban life across contexts.

Hackney, Wartime Poster 2025. Acrylic on Canvas, digital print, On process

Commentary by Dr Ornella De Nigris

Senior Researcher in Chinese Studies, University of Siena; Academic Curatorial Advisor to The Mimetic Game on the Street

What emerges from Neo’s humorous yet rigorous approach is a curatorial and artistic framework that repositions the street, not as a passive backdrop to urban life, but as a living, shifting site of narrative construction and cultural inquiry. His works invite viewers to return to the everyday with renewed attentiveness: to personalise, recontextualise, and re-encounter the mundane through a lens shaped by memory, improvisation, and speculative perception. By expanding notions of spatial proximity and embodied awareness, Neo reconstructs the artist’s relationship to the urban environment—embracing locality while teasing out resonances that cross cultural and perceptual boundaries.

His practice cultivates playful, affective associations with the often-overlooked details of daily life, while also challenging the unconscious distance many maintain toward cultural difference. Neo is a rare emerging artist who bridges disciplines with intellectual precision, fusing multicultural perspectives with sensitivity to local contexts. His practice translates theoretical complexity into a visual language that is materially refined and emotionally resonant. Drawing on his anthropological background, Neo proposes a vocabulary of conviviality, subtle exchange, and shared imagination—integrating fieldwork, personal memory, and digital materiality into a distinct, cross-cultural aesthetic methodology.

By employing LiDAR-generated scans, sourced from both physical streetscapes and online platforms, Neo produces distorted, spectral renderings. Rather than correcting these glitches, he reconfigures them into symbolic compositions that examine the entangled vernaculars of digital urban imagery, memory, and spatial perception.

Hackney, Wartime Poster, 2025. Acrylic on Canvas, digital print, Exhibition View

Q&A with Neo Jiapu Gao:

What led you to focus specifically on the street as a primary site of artistic inquiry?

To me, the street is the ever-renewing cutaneous layer of urban life—a porous membrane where the public sphere brushes up against the fringes of private experience. It is where the unintended traces of movement, memory, and adaptation accumulate, becoming both aesthetic material and anthropological evidence. In many communities, the street is also where everyday agency plays out: bedsheets are hung to dry on public gym equipment; tables and chairs are moved outdoors to reclaim communal space; invisible borders are drawn and redrawn to define zones of familiarity and belonging. These acts of informal spatial negotiation reveal how individuals reconfigure the functional logic of the city to better accommodate their own rhythms and expectations. The street, in this sense, becomes not only a site of observation but also one of authorship.

Pepper (Ba Dong) Indulging, 2024 (1 of 6), 花椒 (巴东) 梦, 2024, Variable Size, Frames From Footage “Pepper Indulging”, Silk-screen printing, Acrylic, Digital prints, lithography

As an artist engaging with anthropology as a method, in what ways has anthropological thinking influenced your practice?

Anthropology, as a mode of thinking and perceiving, has given me a way to more fully inhabit and interpret the environments I move through. It trains my attention toward how meaning is formed—through space, gesture, habit—and helps me navigate the subtle dynamics of presence and relation. My ideas often emerge in motion, outside the studio, when I’m not actively seeking them. Art practice to me becomes less a process of planning, more a sustained openness to the surroundings. Anthropology also shifts how I engage with cultural difference, not as something to define, but as something to dwell within. In a world shaped by dislocation and conflict, this way of sensing allows me to hold complexity, to linger with contradiction, and to translate ambiguity into form.

If We Wish, Iron Gates, Fish and Paper planes, 2025, Metal, 3D printing resin, canvas, wood

250×200×150 cm. On Process

How do you see the role of digital technology in your artistic practice?

Digital technologies offer me a way of seeing that is fundamentally distinct from conventional human perception—a form of hyperreal observation. In this exhibition, I make extensive use of LiDAR (Light Detection and Ranging) scanning, a technique that constructs space by calculating the time it takes for laser pulses to travel between objects. The results vary significantly depending on the devices and methods used, often producing unexpected visual distortions and spectral forms that I find particularly generative.

LiDAR allows me to reflect on how humans, machines, and non-human intelligences experience space differently. The same scan can yield vastly different images depending on the interface or software, enabling me to stretch, flatten, or distort environments and recombine unrelated symbols. These glitches and misreadings become tools for reimagining meaning in the everyday. For me, LiDAR is both archival and sculptural. Its outputs emerge from diverse sources: ruins of war-torn homes, my studio, fragments from street-shot music videos, or kids gathering to play—all suspended between stillness, motion, memory, and fiction.

Untitled 2, Acrylic on Canvas, Digital Print, 2025, 80×60 cm 

How do the fragmented spaces of the street shape your ways of sensing and making meaning in your work?

In most contemporary cities, spatial experience remains highly fragmented from the perspective of the individual. The boundaries between infrastructure, public domains, and private property are increasingly blurred. In London, for instance, it is very common to feel a visceral sense of detachment when moving between places. Still, to me, a barber shop in Hackney and a private gallery in Mayfair are not separate entities. They resonate together, connected through a constellation of material objects, memory, imagination, and perceptions. They vibrate as part of the same urban organism. This is why I continue to pay close attention to the forms of information embedded in everyday street life. I see them as modular channels—like flying signal paths on a giant synthesiser—being plugged and unplugged across different nodes, producing waves of transformation and flows of energy. These pathways create a kind of metabolism, just like the keratin of our skin: constantly shedding, renewing, and absorbing.

To articulate the underlying relationship between these spatial experiences and my own practice, I often turn—subjectively—to Gilles Deleuze’s concept of the fold. Deleuze challenged the classical notion of the world as composed of discrete, autonomous entities. Instead, he proposed a world structured through continuity: a single, undulating surface, always folding and unfolding, never entirely separate or fixed. The fold, in this metaphysical sense, is not merely a crease but a way of describing how things come into being—a process of ‘becoming’, a continuous movement and modulation of reality. Digital technologies such as LiDAR further enable this folding and unfolding of the urban fabric. Allowing distant contexts to converge and exposing the entangled rhythms and overlapping perspectives embedded in everyday urban life.

For more details about Neo Jiapu Gao and his work please visit his Instagra @neodasein, and to stay tuned for updates on his solo exhibition The Mimetic Game on the Street.