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Jade Franklin on Guo Wei
Born in 1960, Guo Wei was six years old when Mao Zedong declared his |
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Jade Franklin on Guo Wei
Born in 1960, Guo Wei was six years old when Mao Zedong declared his campaign to rid China of “bourgeois liberalism”—that infamous period in Chinese history known as the Cultural Revolution. He was alive during the material shortages, the dictated restrictions, and the ever-present apprehension that characterized this time, but was too young for it to fully impact his adult life. He graduated from the Sichuan Academy of Fine Arts in 1989, eleven years after the art academies reopened in 1978.
By 1989, China was firmly in the grip of modernization. Although government intolerance toward social and artistic freedom was still great—as demonstrated by the events of June 4 in Tiananmen Square—significant changes in the general consciousness of the Chinese people were taking place as the country continued to open up to the world. In terms of artistic thinking, a break had been made from Communist ideals that lauded the collective, and there was an increasing focus on individual expression. One can clearly see this conceptual shift in Wei’s works. Rather than criticizing or commenting upon social situations directly like the “first generation” artists, Wei depicts highly individualized figures and demonstrates the impact that contemporary society has on them, exploring wider-reaching concerns in doing so. This approach is common for artists of his generation and is considered the norm in the West, but such a concentration on the individual would have been unthinkable in China 30 years ago.
Usually the subjects in Guo Wei’s paintings are children. These figures appear in pairs or small groups but do not interact with each other and seem emotionally detached from their surroundings. Not that their environs provide much stimuli—Wei provides no situational context and he presents subjects in predominantly empty space.
In these barren settings the children are shown at play, sometimes wearing masks or holding toys. The monochrome palette and precise, nearly clinical, painting style employed by the artist effectively robs the children of amusement and vitality. Their dramatic and exaggerated poses insinuate that this is not simply child’s play, for they are coupled with frank, forward-facing stares that suggest acute self-awareness .
In his “Indoor: Mosquito and Moth” series, the artist includes flying insects in his otherwise barren spaces. His subjects writhe and squirm, trying to escape an inner torment, one that is exacerbated by the presence of the insects. The lack of any tangible contact between the figures suggests that Wei’s adolescents are firmly entrapped within their own sense of isolation.
“They are playing themselves, but also you, me, and others,” the artist says of his adoloscent subjects. Inherent in the works of Wei are feelings of discontent and a general restlessness with life. In his lifetime, Wei has witnessed China go through a myriad of changes, without a resulting personal satisfaction—only frustration and disappointment. As a result people have increasingly withdrawn from society, as they endeavour to adjust to the choices that are now available and to the new levels of expectation that accompany such dramatic social transformation.
