Neo (Jiapu) Gao is a London-based anthropological researcher and transdisciplinary artist whose practice traverses writing, sculpture, sound installation, moving image, and performance. Drawing upon autobiographical fragments, folklore, and marginalised histories, Neo’s work reconstructs and reimagines the politics of identity through archival objects and embodied storytelling. Symbols of dislocated cultures are assembled—sometimes delicately, sometimes forcefully—through the lens of contemporary migration, transforming fragments of personal and collective memory into forms that breathe, resist, and speak.
Neo’s recent research focuses on pan–East Asian oral histories of migration, geo-ethnography and geomorphology, seeking to understand how identity shifts within environments shaped by natural and political forces. Having experienced multiple relocations in his youth, he approaches place not as a geographic constant but as a site of becoming—where memory and myth converge. Since the COVID-19 pandemic, questions of dislocation, the erosion of local knowledge, and shifting social policies have intensified his commitment to exploring how personal identity is created in negotiation with changing landscapes—natural, social, and psychic.
Neo’s latest work was recently presented in the group exhibition Oriented by Dialect: Those Diffracted Scenes Among Us, a project that brought together emerging global artists who met in London, but who speak, dream, and think in different tongues. The exhibition explored dialect as more than language—as a fractured medium of migration, memory, and difference. It staged an alternative return to “marginal regions,” real or imagined, where identity is reconstituted not through homogeneity, but through metaphor, resistance, and poetic reinvention.
As part of the curatorial team, Neo contributed to shaping the conceptual framework of the exhibition. His curatorial approach, like his art, is rooted in an anthropological attention to the margins—those overlooked spaces where individual and cultural histories linger. The exhibition sought to uncover the humanistic impulses behind material expression, and to explore how these impulses are embedded in the work of diasporic artists across borders.
The exhibition was presented at the University Women’s Club, a Georgian building steeped in the late reformist tradition, the setting served as both backdrop and interlocutor. It creates a recontextualisation of the iconic historical incidents, reflecting on the identity conflicts inherent in the processes of migration, dislocation and the erosion of local knowledge. Within its ornate halls and heavy mouldings, the works initiated a dialogue between history and the present—between the formal documented history and the personal archives of displacement, the impermanence of voice, body, and home.
Neo’s work, The Alluvial Voice, anchors these questions through a delicate, multi-sensory multi-media art on migration and personal memory. The work documents the lives of two generations of a migrant family displaced by the construction of the Three Gorges Dam and resettled on Chongming Island, a deltaic formation at the mouth of the Yangtze River near Shanghai. This landscape—neither fully land nor sea—becomes a poetic site through which the artist reimagines identity as sedimentary: layered, shifting and unstable. This work reflects the living conditions of domestic involuntary migrants in contemporary China, exploring the choices and unknown barriers faced by residents in the context of socio-economic reconstruction.
The work offers an ethnographic yet poetically charged exploration of involuntary domestic migration in contemporary China, revealing the subtle emotional and material conditions that shape these lives—where choice is often constrained, and agency emerges in fragile, unexpected places. The short film component of the piece juxtaposes portraiture and interviews with footage of the island’s natural and social landscapes. Through this carefully composed sequencing of moving images, Neo creates a multi-scalar portrayal of his field research, mapping the topography of memory and identity onto the terrain of the island itself. Geography becomes more than setting—it is an archive of displacement.
The short film juxtaposes portraits and interviews of the residents across the island, with footage of the island’s natural and social landscapes. Through this carefully composed sequencing of moving images, Neo creates a multi-scalar portrayal of his field research, mapping the topography of memory and identity onto the terrain of the island itself. It merged the natural alluvial features with the social-political identities of the Three Gorges migrants through curatorial means, the work fuses the migrants’ daily lives, identities and environmental changes into the same context. Geography becomes more than setting—it is an archive of displacement.
At the centre is a replica of a sampan sail made by Neo, modelled on those used along the Yangtze River in the 1980s. The sail adds a theatrical effect to the work, creates a symbolic narrative of the migrants’ previous identity with archival objects, therefore situating dialogues between their current living states with the obscure past. The sail is placed on a mouldy pillow, epitomising a specific moment in the past, providing the audience a glimpse into the history, reimagining a scene on the river. The mouldedness also implies the flooded hometowns and the forgotten memories.
Scattered across printed pages of prose-poetry are Sichuan green peppercorns, whose sharp aroma fills the room with an olfactory imprint of place. The prose-poem, Peppercorn Indulgence, written by Neo, is framed in the voice of a Coleridgean sailor-figure who used to patrol on the River. The writing weaves together indigenous phrases, mythic imagery, and intimate observation to tell a story of environmental upheaval and social erosion along the Yangtze. These overlapping sensory dimensions—textual, visual, olfactory—immerse the audience in a world that is both deeply personal and geopolitically resonant.
On the far side of the installation, five video monitors are arranged in a deliberately fragmented manner. This spatial design resists narrative linearity and instead gestures toward the incomplete and provisional nature of ethnographic knowledge. The installation presents the different dimensions and thought processes of the migration investigation, as to reference Casey Boyle’s theories–to ‘map’ out the ethnographic research outcomes also helps emphasise the materiality when implementing ‘theories of place’ and exploring the ‘sensuous interrelationship of body-mind-environment’ in investigations. (Bolye 1996; Ingold 2007)
The Alluvial Voice marks Neo’s first short-term ethnographic study and a significant development in his practice. Through metonymic substitution, it transforms the trajectory of domestic Chinese migrants and their reshaped identities into a humanistic geography—where personal experience becomes symbolic terrain. The installation is not merely a document of displacement, but a choreography of fragments, recollections, and reassembled symbols. The project explores the recomposition of the foreign and the local, the global and the domestic, through a form of embodied translation. This is especially evident in the poetic register of Neo’s writing, which incorporates regional fictions, folklore, and lyrical abstraction to suggest new modes of storytelling for contemporary reality.
Neo will next present a newly edited version of Pepper Indulging (The Alluvial Voice) at The Green Grammar, opening on 27th June at the Art’otel Gallery in London. This exhibition, inspired by Hermann Hesse’s natural philosophy in which beings from nature such as food become a metaphorical bridge linking the personal and the cosmological, explores the sacred embedded within the domestic. In response, the artist emphasises the symbolic and affective resonance of the Sichuan pepper—portraying this indigenous crop as a catalytic compound that fuses natural vitality with historical trauma. The pepper emerges not merely as a botanical reference, but as a pungent emblem of cultural inheritance, rupture, and survival. Through this intensified focus, Neo deepens his inquiry into how everyday sensory materials might embody larger cosmological and historical entanglements.
About the artist:
Neo Jiapu Gao, born in Nei Mongol China, based between London and Beijing. Neo is an anthropology researcher and paralleled practised as a transdisciplinary artist, his practices encompassed writing, sculpture, sound installation, moving images and performance. His artistic motives are usually cultivated by autobiographical poetic writing, where he may be self-empowered to re-narrate the identity politics and histories in archival objects. He collages the dislocated cultures of the foreign and the local through the lens of contemporary migrants, reproducing mythological transpositions and individual life narratives through various materials. His recent research focuses on pan-East Asian oral histories of migration, geo-ethnography, characteristics and changes in social noise in post-millennial.
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