The Making of Living Archives and Personal Histories in Neo Jiapu Gao’s The Mimetic Game Now-Showing

If We Wish, Iron Gates, Gold Fish and Paper Plane, Comprehensive Installation, 2025, Steel, Iron, Resin, Acrylic, Wood, Photo by  Yizhou Lee

Across Neo Jiapu Gao’s works, personal histories surface not as fixed narratives but as fragments shaped by movement, relocation, and the shifting conditions of urban life. Based in London and rooted deep in his Mongolian cultural heritage, Neo demonstrates an intuitive sensitivity to the displacement of both people and objects, capturing the complex emotions of contemporary life. Through carefully devised artistic strategies, his works adopt a contemplative stance, attempting to reveal what individuals truly experience in moments of vulnerability and marginalised conditions of existence.

Drawing from personal memory, ethnographic observation, and digital encounters, Neo picks up seemingly insignificant daily encounters and turns them into staged moments that appear strange at first glance, yet reflect the unsaid personal histories between us and the cultural traces that shape public life. This methodological approach becomes materially visible in a series of sculptural works, including Seesaw Girls, Leverage and Wishing Pond and If We Wish, Iron Gates, Gold Fish and Paper Plane. Both works return to familiar urban scenes, revealing how small, repeated encounters accumulate into spatial memories that are often ignored.

Seesaw Girl, Leverage and Wishing Pond , Comprehensive Installation, 2025, Steel, Iron, Resin, Acrylic, Wood， Photo by Artist

Streetscapes are borrowed as a ‘stage’ where a conglomeration of events takes place—sites such as a blue iron gate with graffiti, a seesaw implanted on a gas can left in the middle of the road, and a strange mould of a girl in gymnastic pose together constitute the skin, the epidermis, of Neo’s vision of urban space. Audiences walking past the works voluntarily respond to these symbols of cultural and linguistic meaning. Yet within this ‘skin’, there are pleats and creases where discontinuity, displacement, and misreading come into play. The sculpted boys captured mid-motion, attached to the abandoned construction door in blue exhibit a typical scene of urban construction. Among these spatial elements, the iron gate emerges as a particularly charged surface.

If We Wish, Iron Gates, Gold Fish and Paper Plane, Comprehensive Installation, 2025, Steel, Iron, Resin, Acrylic, Wood, Photo by  Yizhou Lee

The metallic calligraphy engraved across the surface of the doors emerges as a distinctive marker of the Chinese “Xiaokang” aesthetic, embodying a collective longing for shared prosperity and happiness. To those dwelling on the more advanced side of the city, these visual traces may appear outdated or out of place.  Yet these texts and symbols are like riddles or fragments of folk-songs, murmuring to those who pass at times carrying the viewer back to the rear courtyard of a childhood convenience shop, or recalling the temporary iron gates erected by neighbouring families displaced by demolition and relocation, briefly enclosing pockets of fragile private boundaries. Through their stark contrasts of color, they resist disappearance — asking viewers not simply to look, but to stay, to read, and to  decipher the meanings they stubbornly preserve.

If We Wish, Iron Gates, Gold Fish and Paper Plane, Comprehensive Installation, 2025, Steel, Iron, Resin, Acrylic, Wood, Photo by Artist

The 3D-printed boy, caught in a climbing gesture, draws the viewers to reflection on childhood, innocence and a spirit of adventure, that instant excitement and attention children have when encountering objects that are foreign to them.  Bolts pinned through the boy’s body hint the uncanny sides of the act of adventure, revealing the duality embedded in every interaction between the subject and the urban environment.The small swimming goldfish toys embedded in the boy’s leg, the mysterious graffiti scraps or the penetrating bolts function as metaphors of discontinuity, mapping the artist’s intentions through material form, prompting viewers to interpret these elements through their own experiences.

If We Wish, Iron Gates, Gold Fish and Paper Plane, Comprehensive Installation, 2025, Steel, Iron, Resin, Acrylic, Wood, Photo by Artist

Roaming through his works , I keep thinking about the kinds of lives that sit at the edge of our attention—not because they are insignificant, but because the systems around them have trained us to look past them. Neo also has been circling this edge for some time in another moving images installation. In The Alluvial Voice (2024), he follows two generations of a “Three Gorges” involuntary migrant family on Chongming Island, and the film does not romanticise survival or flatten it into resilience. Instead, it lets life appear through small everyday gestures, choices made within barriers that are not always named, and moments when historical forces press directly onto the domestic sphere.

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

Pepper (Ba Dong) Indulging, 2024, 花椒 (巴东) 梦, 2024, Exhibition view, Photo by Artist

For me, the questions begin here: how is displacement rarely only a change of place? It is a change of tempo and habit, a quiet rewriting of what counts as home, as routes, speech, and routines are reshaped by forces that do not announce themselves. The domestic becomes the surface where infrastructure and policy leave their smallest marks. Pepper Indulging (2024) reveals these very marks through a different register of time and sensation. What might have been reduced to “documentary” becomes something more porous, where testimony and atmosphere lean into each other, and the migrant family’s world is not explained from a distance but allowed to retain its texture, its pauses, its minor turns of feeling. The script reads like a drifting ballad, moving from submerged geographies to kitchen heat, letting language carry what images cannot hold, until even speech feels vulnerable to erosion. I am drawn to the way Neo builds meaning through a multi-sensory approach informed by anthropological research methods. Dialect sits in the work as lived material, carrying closeness and distance at once, and the pepper itself is not a symbol but a disturbance, reaching the body before interpretation has time to settle.

Pepper (Ba Dong) Indulging, 2024, 花椒 (巴东) 梦, 2024, Variable Size Installation, Frames From Video of “Pepper Indulging”, Silk-screen printing, Acrylic, Digital prints, Lithography, Wood, Photo by Artist

Alongside these narrative explorations, archives are made personal and continuously evolving through Neo’s use of digital technology—LiDAR (Light Detection and Ranging) scanning in his art-making process. Accessed on smartphones, LiDAR allows the artist to gather spatial data and recreate it on the canvas, making the visual experience fractured, distorted, and “misread.”

Hackney, Wartime Poster  200 × 120 cm,  Wonderland 3 160 × 120 cm, 2025, Acrylic on Canvas, Screen Print,  Comprehensive Material

This interest in fractured spatial perception continues in later works such as FIFA Live (2025) and Hackney, Wartime Poster (2025). The edges of human figures extend into chairs, tables, and walls in the domestic interior; the boundaries between bodies and objects become vaporous. The canvas of a strange male face collaged with delusionary interiors murmur to us in a foreign but distinct way. Looking at these estranged details of objects and gestures, one cannot ignore their existence but instead begins recalling a very personal connection with what we perceive as the real.  Pieces of diaries and scraps of ID cards dissolve into the silhouettes of human forms, just as the past—even the smallest things in life leaves traces quietly on us, shaping our ever-changing identities. Emotions flow through the canvas in splashes of colour; our personal histories accumulate through these minute archives, and the past within us is never settled. Through this formal process of stretching, compressing, fragmenting, and recombining, Neo turns the archive into a living, evolving spectacle.

FIFA Live (Partial) 140 × 100 cm, 2025, Acrylic on Canvas, Screen Print,  Comprehensive Material

I keep returning to The Return of the Real by Hal Foster when thinking about Neo’s body of works, in which the street becomes a living archive. My attention is allowed to slow down as I move through his practise, and what stays with me is not simply noticing more, but a series of questions: what is noticing for, and to whom does it answer? Neo’s mimicry of the street is not imitation staged for spectacle—it is a method of approaching reality through mediation and drift, precisely at those points where representation slips, repeats, glitches, and exposes its seams. Archive fragments, found materials, misreadings, and reconstructions function as an ethics of looking, reminding us that the real rarely arrives cleanly, and that memory and personal histories often survive as residue. Neo builds installations that demand duration, and within that duration it becomes possible to notice how reality is framed, and who is made to live at its edges.

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

Pepper (Ba Dong) Indulging, 2024 (1 of 6), 花椒 (巴东) 梦, 2024, Variable Size, Found Archival Material, Festival Marching in Chongqing, by Sidney Gamble, 1917

Neo Jiapu Gao(@neodasein) is an ethnographic researcher and inter-media artist whose practice encompass writing, sculpture, sound installation, and moving image. His work often initiated from with autobiographical and poetic writing, through which he re-narrates histories and identity politics embedded in archival objects. His recent research focuses on pan–East Asian ecological migration histories, multi-faceted ethnography, and the evolving characteristics of social noise cultures in the post-millennial era. Through these inquiries, he examines how memory, displacement, and environmental transformation are mediated across multiple spatial and temporal scales.

Selected projects and exhibitions include Oriented by Dialect: Those Diffracted Scenes Among Us (University of Women’s Club, London); BIBLIOTEKA Art Book Fair (The Warburg Institute, London); Play Week (WIELS, Brussels); Sound Field Folding (Hundred Year Gallery, London); All Fish Are Dead Fish (Hanger Space, Royal College of Art, London); The Mimetic Game Now-Showing (solo exhibition, 798 Cube Art Museum, Beijing); and Tate Exchange Night Fair (Tate Modern, London).

Catherine Li(@cath_erine_li) is a London-based curator, originally from China, whose practice focuses on site-specific exhibitions, public programming, participatory art, and digital archiving. She now works within UAL’s Public Engagement team, where she produces artist-led events, exhibitions, and residencies that promote public awareness of the university’s research and creative outputs.

Her practice encompasses independent curatorial projects and collaborative programmes that foreground research, cross-disciplinary exchange and participatory engagement. Recent projects include Afterwalls: Of the Panopticon and Its Ruins (Millbank, London), Making Expansive (Austrian Cultural Forum London), Artist Lunch Box (London–Vienna exchange), Cad Red Closet: Performance Arts Night, Peckham Workshop Festival (Peckham Levels) and Sketchibition (role-play card game initiative). Alongside independent curating, Catherine produces artist-led events, residencies and public programmes, and contributes to strategic engagement within institutional and experimental contexts across the UK and Europe.

For more details about Neo Jiapu Gao and his work please visit his Instagram @neodasein.