Tiany Gao

We built this cybernetic beast ourselves. And now it builds us back.

Growing up in a Chinese metropolis, I experienced the city not as inconvenience but as a matrix — a total system reproducing itself through the bodies, senses, and psyches of its inhabitants.

So the question became: How does one explore and construct a personal mental oasis within this world?

Over a year, I explored through material experiments, installations, and embodied performance — acts of focus, resistance, and disappearance. And gradually, a territory emerged: the Mental Oasis — a private heterotopia where the system's rules are suspended, memory replaces noise, and doing nothing is the most radical act.

This journey is mapped in a single image — my modern Garden of Earthly Delights.

In an age of anxiety, optimization, and replacement, to offer radical focus and reconnection with wilderness — this is itself a radical design position.

Tiany Gao