Michael Gao (he/him) is a Chinese painter based in London whose work explores societal dynamics, identity, violence, and desire within contemporary visual culture. In his recent solo exhibition Full Moons with Tuesday to Friday (Spain), he constructs a fantastical world of hybrid human-animal figures, drawing on ancient rituals of transformation and contemporary furry culture to examine desire as a primal, ritualised force. Working in oil with a blend of airbrush precision and gestural brushwork, Gao creates surreal, photoreal compositions with flattened pictorial space that evoke both allure and claustrophobia, reflecting the tensions of life within digital and post-Internet environments.