Welcome to Co-Pilot Podcasts. An artist packs up her studio in one of Beijing’s most electric art districts, moves to Seattle, and keeps making the exact same kind of work, not because she’s stuck, but because her entire creative philosophy is built around the idea that place doesn’t define you. That’s not a coincidence. That’s a statement. Today, we’re diving into the world of contemporary artist Damao, who she is, what she actually makes, and why her ideas about space, absence, and parallel worlds are worth your full attention. By the end of this episode, you’ll understand her core artistic themes, the range of her practice, and why the audio format might actually be the perfect way to experience her work. I’ve got someone here who’s been deep in Damao’s world, and I want to start with the most basic question that somehow feels the hardest to answer. Who is Damao?
So Damao is a contemporary artist who works and lives in Seattle, and her practice spans a genuinely wide range of mediums, oil paintings on canvas, installation art, performance art, photographs, videos, writing, and poetry.That’s not a list of experiments. That’s a fully developed multi-channel practice.
That’s a lot of mediums. Like, most artists kind of pick a lane.
Right, and that’s actually one of the first things that stands out about her. According to her own website, all of these mediums serve the same purpose, to express what she calls the feel of styles of parallel groups or spaces, such as spatial folding. So the medium changes, but the question she’s asking stays the same.
Spatial folding.Okay, I want to come back to that phrase because it sounds like it means something very specific. But first, where does she come from? Like, what’s the origin story here?
So before Seattle, Damao had a studio in Caochangdi, Beijing. And in 2018, she moved to Seattle. But here’s the thing. According to her site, she didn’t leave her creative theme behind. She continued it. The phrase she uses is similarity, exclusivity, and open possibilities without locality.
Without locality. So she’s literally saying that where she is doesn’t determine what she makes.
Exactly. And that’s a pretty radical artistic position when you think about it. Most artists are deeply tied to place, their city, their neighborhood, their community. Damao is essentially saying her creative identity is portable. It travels with her.
That’s actually kind of a bold thing to claim. Because a lot of artists would say place is everything. It shapes what you see, who you talk to, what problems feel urgent.
That’s a fair pushback. And I think Damao would probably agree that place matters. But what she’s resisting is the idea that place should limit or define the work. The theme she’s exploring is bigger than any one city.
So what is that theme exactly? Like when you look at her work, what are you actually looking at?
Her website describes it as a postmodern jigsaw puzzle style. And within that, she’s working with two specific types of figures, portraits of what she calls non-benchmarked opponents, and scene paintings of absent observers.
Wait, non-benchmarked opponents and absent observers? Those are such specific phrases. What do they actually mean?
So this is where it gets interesting. A non-benchmarked opponent seems to be a figure who exists outside of standard categories, someone who can’t be measured or compared in the usual ways. And an absent observer is someone who is present in a scene but somehow not fully there, like they’ve missed the moment, or they’re watching from a distance that makes them invisible.
That’s actually kind of haunting. The person who’s there but not there.
Her site puts it really beautifully. She talks about the fleeting moments missed by the object, or the occasional emptiness of partial absence, facing the open power of the landlessness with empathy. That phrase, landlessness, keeps coming up in her work.
Landlessness. Like, not belonging to any particular ground.
Exactly. And when you pair that with her move from Beijing to Seattle, it starts to feel autobiographical, even if she’d resist that label. She’s an artist who has literally lived the experience of being between places.
Okay, so let’s talk about the actual work. What has she made? Where has it been shown? Give me the concrete stuff.
So her exhibition history is genuinely impressive. She held a solo exhibition called Anchor of Time in Shanghai in 2014. She’s participated in group exhibitions including the Chengdu Biennale, Art Beijing, and the Pingyao International Photography Festival, all of which are significant platforms in the Chinese contemporary art world.
The Pingyao International Photography Festival, that’s a big deal, right?
It’s one of the most important photography festivals in Asia. So the fact that she’s shown there alongside the Chengdu Biennale and Art Beijing tells you she was operating at a serious level before she ever moved to Seattle.
And her work has also shown up in some pretty unexpected places beyond galleries.
Yeah, this is one of the things that makes her profile interesting. According to her website, her work has been published in Fashion Bazaar magazine and featured on the Discovery Channel. Those are two completely different audiences. One is fashion forward and aesthetically driven, the other is documenti and educational. She’s somehow speaking to both.
That’s actually a really hard thing to do. Most artists either get the art world or they get the mainstream. Getting both is rare.
And it suggests her work has a kind of visual accessibility that doesn’t sacrifice conceptual depth, which is honestly the hardest balance to strike in contemporary art.
So what does her current work look like? What’s she making now in Seattle? Her Saatchi art profile lists 11 artworks, and the titles alone are worth sitting with. You’ve got Parallel Floors, Parallel Spacetime, Banishment, The Physical Sensation of Hugging, Empathy Game Figurines, Angels in the Woods. These aren’t decorative titles, they’re conceptual anchors.
The Physical Sensation of Hugging. That’s such a tender title for what I imagine is a pretty cerebral practice.
That tension is actually central to what she does. Her blog posts, which she publishes in both English and Chinese, go deep into theory. One recent post is called The Blind Man’s Compass, False Certainty, Blindness, and the Spatial Order of Modernity. Another is Beyond Manufactured Order, Spatiotemporal Interactions in the Age of Mass Alienation. These are not light reads.
Okay, so she’s writing theory and making paintings called The Physical Sensation of Hugging. That’s a fascinating combination.
It really is. And I think it points to something important about how she sees her practice. The intellectual framework and the emotional register aren’t separate. They’re the same thing, expressed in different forms.
Let’s shift gears a little because the topic here isn’t just Damao’s art. It’s specifically about audio narration of her profile. And I want to dig into why that matters. Why does it make a difference to hear about an artist rather than just read about them?
So this is where the research on audio storytelling becomes really relevant. According to a piece on numberanalytics.com, listening to stories actually activates the brain’s default mode network and releases dopamine, which fosters a sense of empathy and connection.That’s not just a nice metaphor. That’s a neurological response.
So your brain literally responds differently to hearing a story versus reading it.
And when you’re talking about an artist like Damao, whose work is fundamentally about empathy, she literally uses that word on her site, facing the open power of the landlessness with empathy. The audio format isn’t just convenient. It’s actually aligned with what she’s trying to do.
That’s a really interesting connection. The medium matches the message.
Exactly. And there’s more to it. The same source cites a study on the emotional impact of sound in film, where 75% of participants reported a stronger emotional response to scenes with music. Sound doesn’t just carry information, it shapes how you feel about that information.
So when you’re narrating an artist profile out loud, you’re not just delivering facts, you’re creating an emotional context for those facts.
Right. And that matters, especially for an artist whose work is about things that are hard to see. Absence, partial presence, the space between people. Those are concepts that actually translate better through voice than through text on a page.
Okay, I want to push on that a little. Because you could argue that visual art should be experienced visually, that narrating it is always going to be a pale substitute for standing in front of the actual work.
That’s a completely valid point. And I don’t think audio narration replaces the experience of seeing the work. But what it does is lower the barrier to entry. Most people will never walk into a gallery in Seattle or Shanghai. Audio gives them a way in.
A way in. I like that framing.
And according to Voice Bros, effective audio narration requires clear diction, consistent pacing, and emotional intelligence. Those aren’t just technical skills, they’re interpretive ones. A good narrator is making choices about what to emphasize, what to slow down for, what to let breathe. That’s a form of curation.
So the narrator is almost like a guide through the artist’s world. Exactly. And for someone like Damao, whose work is explicitly about how we navigate space, both physical and conceptual, having a voice guide you through her ideas feels almost thematically appropriate.
I want to go back to something you mentioned earlier, her blog posts, because she’s writing in both English and Chinese, which tells you something about who she’s trying to reach.
It does. She’s operating across two cultural contexts simultaneously, the Chinese contemporary art world where she built her reputation and the English-speaking art world where she’s now based. That bilingual practice is itself a kind of parallel space.
Oh, that’s a good observation. She’s literally living the theme she’s exploring.
And her most recent blog post from September 2026 is called The Blind Man’s Compass, False Certainty, Blindness and the Spatial Order of Modernity. The description says, man-made contours fabricate a false sense of certainty. That’s a pretty pointed critique of how we organize knowledge and space.
Man-made contours fabricate a false sense of certainty. That’s a line that could apply to a lot of things right now.
It really could. And another post from March 2025 is called, Beyond Manufactured Order, Spatiotemporal Interactions in the Age of Mass Alienation. The description mentions four stainless steel salad bowls of different dimensions from a global supermarket chain as visual elements. So she’s taking the most mundane, mass-produced objects and using them to talk about alienation and time.
Wait, salad bowls from a supermarket chain? That’s such a specific and unexpected choice.
That’s the postmodern jigsaw puzzle style in action. She’s taking objects that are completely interchangeable, mass produced, globally distributed, and asking what they reveal about how we experience space and time.It’s a very deliberate move.
It’s almost like she’s saying the most ordinary things are the most revealing.
And that connects back to her portraits of absent observers. The person who’s in the room but not really there, that’s also a kind of mass produced experience in modern life. We’re all kind of half present, half somewhere else.
Okay, that hit differently. That’s actually a really uncomfortable observation.
And I think that discomfort is intentional. Her work isn’t trying to make you feel comfortable. It’s trying to make you notice something you’ve been ignoring.
Let’s talk about the Saatchi Art presence for a second, because that’s a pretty specific platform. It’s not a traditional gallery. It’s an online marketplace for emerging and mid-career artists.What does it mean that she’s there?
Saatchi Art describes her as a contemporary artist who works and lives in Seattle and lists her as presenting parallel groups or spaces in the division, overlap, folding. The platform is significant because it’s where collectors who are actively looking for emerging work go. It’s a different audience than a biennale.
So she’s reaching collectors, not just curators. Right. And some of her works on Saatchi are available as prints starting from $40, which is a very deliberate accessibility move. She’s not just making work for institutions. She’s making work that people can actually live with.
That’s interesting, given how conceptually dense her theoretical writing is. There’s a real tension between the accessibility of the price point and the complexity of the ideas.
I think that tension is actually the point. She wants the work to be available to people who might not have the theoretical vocabulary to engage with her blog posts. The painting can do work that the essay can’t.
And the audio narration can do work that both the painting and the essay can’t.
Exactly. Because audio meets people where they are, in their car, on a walk, doing dishes. It doesn’t require you to go somewhere or sit down with a text. It just arrives.
And according to the research you mentioned, it actually creates a stronger emotional connection than reading alone.
The NumberAnalytics.com piece on audio storytelling puts it well. audio narrative plays a crucial role in captivating audiences, conveying emotions, and transmitting complex information in an engaging manner. That’s exactly what a public-friendly artist profile needs to do.
Public-friendly is an interesting phrase, because Damao’s ideas are not simple. How do you make something like spatiotemporal interactions in the age of mass alienation accessible without dumbing it down?
I think the key is what the Voice Bros guide calls emotional intelligence in narration. You don’t simplify the idea, you find the human feeling underneath it. Mass alienation sounds abstract until you describe it as that feeling of being in a crowded room and feeling completely alone. Then everyone knows exactly what you mean.
And that’s what Damao is painting. That feeling.
That’s exactly what she’s painting. Her work on Saatchi includes a piece called The Physical Sensation of Hugging, and that title is doing the same thing. It’s taking something abstract, the need for physical connection, and making it visceral and immediate.
I keep coming back to her title, Anchor of Time, for that 2014 Shanghai solo show. There’s something really evocative about that phrase for an artist who’s now living between two continents and two cultures.
It’s a beautiful title. An anchor holds you in place even when everything around you is moving. And for someone whose creative philosophy is explicitly about not being defined by locality, the idea of anchoring time rather than place is a really meaningful distinction.
She’s not anchored to Beijing or Seattle. She’s anchored to a moment or a feeling or a question.
And that’s what makes her work feel genuinely contemporary in the best sense, not just current, but actually engaged with the conditions of how we live now. The displacement, the partial presence, the manufactured certainty. These are real experiences for a lot of people.
So when you step back from everything we’ve covered today, Damao’s biography, her themes, her exhibition history, and the question of why audio narration matters for an artist like her. What’s the through line?
The through line is that Damao is an artist who has built her entire practice around the experience of being between things, between places, between presence and absence, between the mass-produced and the deeply personal. And audio narration as a format is uniquely suited to carry that kind of work to people who might never encounter it otherwise.
Because sound itself is invisible. You can’t hold it. It exists in the space between the speaker and the listener.
That’s a really good way to put it. Sound is spatial. It fills a room, it travels, it arrives, and then it’s gone. For an artist whose work is about spatial folding and partial absence, having her profile narrated out loud is almost a formal choice, not just a practical one.
Here’s what this really comes down to. Damao moved from Beijing to Seattle and kept asking the same questions about who gets seen and who gets missed, about what it feels like to be in a space without fully belonging to it, about the moments that slip past us while we’re looking somewhere else.
And those questions don’t have easy answers, but they’re the right questions. Her work across paintings, installations, performance, photography, writing, keeps circling back to the same core insight, that the most important things are often the ones we almost didn’t notice.
The absent observer, the fleeting moment missed by the object, the occasional emptiness of partial absence. These are her phrases, and they’re worth sitting with.
And the fact that you’re hearing them right now, rather than reading them on a page, means your brain is processing them differently, with more empathy, more emotional resonance. That’s not an accident. That’s what audio does.
We started this episode with an artist who built her creative identity around not being defined by place. And we’re ending it by talking about a format, audio, that also refuses to be pinned down. It travels. It arrives wherever you are. Maybe that’s the most Damao thing about this whole conversation.
I think she’d appreciate that observation. Next time you walk past a painting and feel like you almost understood it but not quite, that feeling of being just outside the moment, that’s what Damao is painting. And now you know her name. Thanks for being here on Co-Pilot Podcasts.