Tingshan Gou's Website

What are you waiting for?

Title and Info	Description	Media
Tingshan Gou 1990, Human	Full time UX engineer, part time artist, resident in San Francisco Bay Area. #CulturalConflict #MillennialImmigrant #Mom #QuestioningArt #SocialIdentity #WomanInTech
Learning Series 04/2022, Enamel and Acrylic Painting with Washable Crayon, 11" x 14"	A learning series from modern artists to decorate our living room wall. An intention to hide these paintings from the wall, thus the enamel paint left from wall paint. Guess whom I learnt from?
Untitled 03/19/2021, Acrylic Painting, 11" x 14"	A birthday gift to my childhood friend Cindy Lin. A painting resembles the color palette of Henri Matisse's Woman With A Hat, to express my respect to her boldness in her career path. The gift message is wrapped around the frame, which the viewer has to read by rotating the painting, challenging traditional ways of appreciating paintings. The painting process has been streamed on Twitch. The whole process was edited to a video clip and later sent to Cindy Lin, in which I mumbled about the intention of my choices and the TV show I was watching. I'm always in deep interest exploring what should be a part of an artwork. The remaining colors? The tools I used? Sounds I heard? TV showed I watched? Do all of them which affect how the painting ends up to be should be a part of the artwork?
Scrambled Eggs with Tomatoes 09/29/2020, Paper Sculpture, Video duration 00:04:26	This paper sculpture is in memory of my grandpa, who died at 12/06/2019 (GMT+8), around 15 weeks of my pregnancy, one month after I came back from visiting. I was told until my son was 100 days old. Scrambled eggs with tomatoes is my all time favorite that my grandpa used to cook for us (me and my cousin) during my entire childhood. I documented the process of my creation and explained the other intention to provide visual stimulation to baby with high contrast drawing that spins. This video was originally posted on RED, a Chinese social media platform that gathers mothers who care about early education. The mumbling was for this purpose but also an experiment of talking through the entire creation. At the end of the day, this dish passes down to my son, the next generation who never met his great grandpa but influenced by him in an interesting way.
Pregnancy Diary 2019-2020, Diary written in Chinese	A diary I started around 7 weeks of pregnancy until after delivery. I went back to China around 12 weeks to visit my family, after coming back, my grandpa died at the age of 94, the COVID pandemic began, and I started to work from home since then. It's a collection of my struggling and conflicted emotions and thoughts around life, death, career, family, everything happening around me.
New York Subway 2015, Unity	Two years after my New York Subway in 2013, the rise of VR enabled a ton of opportunity to create a digital world beyond imagination. However, I really only just wanted to recreate New York subway that works exactly how they work in the real world and looks almost exactly how they would look as much as I can do. The feelings that space brought to me was so special that I wanted to bring it home.
What's the point of view? 2014, Interactive, Made with Unity	Created with Unity in 2014, this piece of work is trying to further explore the concept of reality and the representation of reality on Rene Magritte's painting The Human Condition in 1935 with modern technology.
New York Subway 2013, Animatic, Duration 00:01:01	Spent a ton of time underground commuting between school and home, I always felt New York subway is something special to me. Late nights with few passengers, exotic music comes and goes, people, I was stuck in that closed space and felt like those were everything to me at that moment.
PiNCH 2013, Sculpture, Color Paper	It was made for a typography contest in my first design class in grad school. 12 students in 6 pairs. Each pair had to think of one word and express this word using whatever forms of design. Mine was "pinch", so I used color paper and pinched them into the shape of this word. My "PiNCH" stood out from the rest and won the 1st place and 2 packs of Snickers. Not sure why the lowercase "i", maybe because my insensitiveness of the language as a foreign student at that time, or could be proud of that finishing touch of that little dot on top.
2012.12.22 2012, Installation, Photos, Globe	Photos taken from 6am to 24am, on a 1.5-hour basis, 12 in total, on 12/22/2012, at 39.98N, 116.38E, outside of my home in Beijing, China, thus the format of the date. It is an exploration of asynchronicity between time and space and of my world right after “the end of the world” - 12/21/2012.
t 2012, Sculpture, Wood made from popsicle sticks	“t” represents time in x-axis. You'll see tangent functions from top view, and sine functions from side view. At the very beginning I was intrigued by different perspectives from artists and the polarity of art trend when sometime artists wanted to represent for the neglected uniqueness and sometime for the overlooked everyday objects at the very beginning, but this really applies to any constant changes to the opposite direction, either gradual as a sine function or sudden as a tangent function. This piece, too, is trying to use everyday objects to represent a unique connection between math functions and art trends.
UNchanged 2012, Installation, Paper	I got my inspiration from a summer camp experience in a language school in Los Angeles, CA. Students coming from various backgrounds with untold stories. My first time living in a real global village, the nature of love and care regardless of races, complexions, or religions filled with my heart and resulted in each piece of the origami balloon that represents a child with mixed backgrounds. They are small like sand, but precious like pearls. If world peace is a thing, they must be the key to that future. Each piece of paper is printed with several random chosen national flags, each of which was rotated in a certain angle and added transparency so they could be seen through.
Sausage 2012, Installation, Paper, Casing, Thread	Sausage in China is originally made during winter time and ready to consume when Lunar New Year approaches. Here, the casing is filled with preserved paper money. It's meant to question the self-destructive behavior of making profits from poor quality food. The sausage cuts were made by the butcher who owned the sausage booth.
OUT 2012, Sculpture, Iron Wire, 10cm x 10cm x 30cm	OUT is a self meditation piece. I was curving my own future as I was curving the iron wire for my grad school application, that's probably the missing part for me in the digital world back then. It is made of lines, fragile yet powerful when arranging in a different way in our 3D space.
Metamorphosis 2012, Programming	I hated programming during my entire college majoring in computer science, nothing visual but I still have to stare at my laptop all day everyday. It was until my senior year that I finally found my opportunity with what I learnt. Yes, programming enables interactivity, the nature of which expects reactions that are captured by the magic event listener in every aspect and the following movements are just as natural as technology can be. In the mean time, it tells a story about growth, about the way we keep changing until we are satisfied with who we are. The narration within the inter-activities, the forces one might physically feel from those hits, is what I'm really interested to explore.
The Agent 2012, Sound, Duration 00:00:31	The sound was captured when I photographed my works during my grad school application. I tried so hard to best represent my works that the focusing sound started to haunt me in a very annoying yet fascinating way, as if it's telling me that the representation sometimes outweighs the actuality.
I, The Fish 2008, Digital Collage from A Fish That Smiled At Me by Jimmy Liao.	My first digital work in my freshman year, at the time when everyone got their first laptop entering college and got introduced to the magic Photoshop.
Toilet 2006, Polymer Clay	The urge to go to the restroom during a polymer clay class in my high school gave birth to my first masterpiece. I thought it could be hardened by microwave but the whole piece turned into a lump of brownish melt.