-- Artist statement
In 2011, when I was shooting the twin series, I noticed that there were two children of two different families looked very similar. I was very surprised at the time. After all, the two families were separated dozens of miles away. It was only after further questioning that I found out they had Down syndrome. Due to their unique facial features, they are commonly known as "international faces" or "international people" in some areas.
Out of curiosity, I looked up a lot of informations. What attracted me most was that the Italian painter Andrea Mantegna (1431~1506) portrayed Jesus in the image of the Virgin and Child as a child with Down syndrome, but Martin Luther (1483-1546) publicly called for the killing of people with intellectual disabilities. We can see clearly that even though they have the same religion, there were two very different attitudes towards people with disabilities. Some people speculate that Down's syndrome was not considered as a disease at that time. After all, the existence of Down syndrome was first published by John Langton Tang in 1866 in Conditions of congenital mental retardation. This shows that the classification criteria and categories of disabilities are variable, and that the division between normal and disabled people is actually some kind of conscious social behavior. In a certain period of time, people being regarded as being disabled by society, may be considered normal human beings in another space-time situation.
Everyone has a different body, and it is because of this difference that we are able to exist as unique human beings. However, the different physical appearance of people with disabilities often becomes the focus of public attention, so much that they are despised, ridiculed, and even regarded as evil. When people are used to look at disabled people with different eyes, people raising children with disabilities face great pressure. So, I wanted to respond to the portrait of the Virgin and Child by Andrea Mantegna, by taking photographs of some mothers with children born with disabilities.
Gao Rongguo 高荣国 was born in 1984 in Binzhou, China's Shandong province. He graduated from the Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing in 2012, majoring in photography. Gao is an artist based in Beijing. His work have been exhibited internationally, with venues including National Portrait Gallery, Quai Branly Museum, CAFA Art Museum, Chongqing Art Museum, Today Art Museum, Dong Gang Museum of Photography, Sotheby's gallery, Changjiang Museum of contemporary Art, and Beijing Mingsheng Art Museum. His work has been featured in TIME, The Huffington Post, DailyMail, VANITY FAIR, La Repubblica,Esquire, Feature Shoot and Rheinische Post Online.
