| In Huang Jiaoping, meetings with an artist occur in the afternoon, most of the time. The local artists are kind and welcoming, their studios are only considered fully equipped when furnished with a decent sound system and some facilities for making tea and coffee. Most visitors here are surprised to find a vast collection of military models in these spaces, mostly aeroplanes and tanks, and an almost equal number of boxes containing CDs and DVDs of classical music. Guo Jin greets visitors warmly, but upon reaching the subject of his own art, like most creative artists, he is unwilling to be drawn into defining and describing his work. Many people ask, “What are you painting now?”—to which he will invariably reply, smiling, “The same as always, portraits of children.” He offers nothing more on the subject. |  |
Things That Change, Things That Don’t – Callisto Searle
In Huang Jiaoping, meetings with an artist occur in the afternoon, most of the time. The local artists are kind and welcoming, their studios are only considered fully equipped when furnished with a decent sound system and some facilities for making tea and coffee. Most visitors here are surprised to find a vast collection of military models in these spaces, mostly aeroplanes and tanks, and an almost equal number of boxes containing CDs and DVDs of classical music.
Guo Jin greets visitors warmly, but upon reaching the subject of his own art, like most creative artists, he is unwilling to be drawn into defining and describing his work. Many people ask, “What are you painting now?”—to which he will invariably reply, smiling, “The same as always, portraits of children.” He offers nothing more on the subject. Like a magician who would rather give nothing away on the method of his illusions, he prefers to allow his audience to enjoy the moment when its members can suspend their disbelief and be amazed.
According to Friedman and Rosenman’s studies on stress and heart disease, personalities may be divided into two types in terms of their responses to life’s experiences. Type A personalities find it difficult to relax, whilst Type B personalities find joy and wonder in the simplest of things. The latter quality of being able to feel such wonder and amazement is often defined as a more child-like perspective on the world. Although as adults each of us represents various possible combinations of maturity and immaturity, childhood is a common experience that we share. To a certain extent, this fact alone accounts for the broad appeal of Guo Jin’s works. The experience of childhood and the idealism, as well as the wonder and make-believe associated with that time in our lives has been an integral part of each of our life’s experiences. However, rather than being typified by the characteristics of one personality type or another, we are all more likely to be comprised of varying measures of both.
In previous essays, the method by which Guo Jin renders his children in three layers of paint and through age and wear has been described in full. Broadly understood to be a representation of the passage of time, this technique is also yet another layer of interference that may provoke a variety of reactions in the viewer.
The effect of temporal remove is achieved by means of placing the image of youth, a child, amidst the visible effects of aging. The purpose is to visualize the contrast between those things that change with time with those that do not, namely the changeless and carefree imagination of childhood.
It is important not to overlook the spatial dimensions that this particular technique adds to Guo Jin’s works. From an aesthetic perspective, the physical distance that the layers create between the children in the paintings and the viewer may be recognized as what the Chinese art critic Li Zehou appraises in the popular phrase “distance creates beauty” or, as Guo Jin has written previously, “the beauty of an indistinct thing.” The blurry filter that prevents us from enjoying an entire, and entirely clear, view of an object is also reminiscent of the special weather of Sichuan and the misty, half-hidden scenery that charms visitors and locals. Chongqing in particular, as a developing city stepping out of its past and as a key base of heavy industry, holds a legacy of an added layer of air pollution which thickens the atmosphere around the city, draping both the old factories and the new skyscrapers. It builds a new third layer in terms of aesthetic appearance.
The patterns in Guo Jin’s works, created by varying degrees of paint and removed pigment, creates a disturbance to the uniformity of colour and shade whilst suggesting the ravages of time. In a very practical and literal sense, a physical distance is created between the child on the canvas and the viewer. And it is in distance, in the space between observer and observed object that the viewer can conclude their own ideas in order to make up the whole of the image.
A similar principle may be at work in the children’s features, which have been simplified as if seen at a glance or from a distance into a stylized and basic format of only light and shade. The eyes, the key to human recognition, are small dark pupils with little further definition. The mouths in particular bear similarity to each other. By painting features that are indistinct yet vaguely similar, the artist ensures that no individual model may be identified too clearly, whilst by virtue of the same stylistic choice, in the simplest rendering of expression he creates the opportunity for us to identify the children, through a gesture or pose, as people we know or have known, even as ourselves. They become significant as figures, rather than as individuals. This is not to say that they lack individuality, but that the differing and individual characters are shown by external attributes and, that they all share in that magical game of childhood when we love to dress up, trying out different personae and attitudes just as we try on different hats, and adults enjoy watching children play in this way, which goes some way to explain the broad appeal of the pictures.
“Nothing is perfect, when the cave paintings were new, the colours were probably tacky and bright, the shapes would have been complete. But in the state of ruin, there is a melancholy beauty of that which has been lost, damaged and faded.” What Guo Jin refers to in describing his response to the Dazu stone carvings in the outskirts of Chongqing, is the possibility created by temporal distance and the damaged, semi-preserved images that is left behind. Despite a rational knowledge that the original may not have appealed to us, our wilful imagination creates a third place, beauty according to our own principles and augmented by a sad feeling of loss or perhaps the warm glow of nostalgia. Between the perfect original and the end state of unrecognisable destruction is a midpoint that allows us to imagine a new original, unconstrained by the rational truth, and according to our own aesthetic principles. A rational line of reasoning may inquire: if we are well aware that the original may have been unattractive to us, then in doing so we are embarking on an act of pure imagination. If so, then the process of recognition in pieces of artwork created by artists long before our birth and in different countries around the world is based on a similar premise of forgetting the rational and allowing the imaginative leap. This then, may be precisely the kind of “carefree imagination” that appears in Guo Jin’s own analyses so often, an imagination that is not curbed by the admirably mature ideas of reality and fact.
In Barrie’s masterpiece, Peter Pan, the premise that allows the children to fly and enter “Neverland”, is that “as long as children are gay and innocent and heartless”. Unwilling to apply logical reasoning and doubt to one’s dreams and activities produces images that are entirely rooted in the self, such a mindset may even be interpreted as cruel or thoughtless. A milder criticism is that a child’s imagination and mode of thought is “unrealistic”, a lack of consideration for the constraints of the real world are widely recognised as childish and immature. In fact, the idea that our need for a world of imagination remains unchanged within our changing bodies, is examined in depth by Freud in his interpretation of imagination and daydreaming. The imagination, make believe and role-playing that forms an integral part of the process of learning to be an adult, once successful is deemed “immature” and is relegated to the realm of fantasy, day dreaming and other more passive modes of indulgence still broadly dismissed as childish and non-productive time wasting. What may lie implicit in the discovery that although deemed childish and useless, the imaginative life of an individual continues to flourish is that the activity which is figurative in our early development may also be essential in our adult lives, albeit in a way that is difficult to measure objectively.
Whilst we all indulge in dreaming to a certain extent and with differing levels of belief in the dreams, the creative artist (Freud “Creative Writers and Day Dreamers”) sees his own desires, those things appealing to himself realised in the products of his creation. Thereby revealing to some extent his hidden world, which like daydreaming and imagination is an activity beyond the rules of the real world. Jung would later come to say, “The creation of something new is not accomplished by the intellect but by the play instinct acting from inner necessity. The creative mind plays with the objects it loves”.
Guo Jin paints a kind of idealism, of the golden memories of childhood. Like memories, the pictures are captured and changeless, yet altered by the process of remembering to something slightly apart from strict realism. Yet rather than present the warm and perfect images that traditionally follow the terms “idealism” or “nostalgia”, he creates a system of imagery that encompasses aged and decrepit forms, of incomplete vision and of parts missing from a whole. We are presented with a highly individual aesthetic principle, in which bare and barren branches are adorned with an eerie cold morning light and the dressing up play of children can stretch to growing horns and tails.
The small portraits series, “I want to be a child with the chance to choose…”, numbers close to fifty small paintings and depicts Chinese children dressed as specific heroic characters and easily recognisable “types” (cowboy, red soldier) from both Western and Eastern cultural history. They could almost have been made to document the phenomenon of dressing up and role-play in children.
Depictions of culturally significant and recognisable figures have always largely relied upon some form of labelling or attribution. In Classical Greek vases we may turn to the inscribing of a name beside the figures of myths and history to inform us of his or her identity. A more subtle method used widely and perhaps more universally accessible is the role of the symbol, the attribute, and the object that typifies the figure. Whether the signifier is more culturally specific, such as the young chicken that signifies Ganymede or the deer-hunter cap of Lei Feng, or more widely recognisable symbols such as hearts and roses for love or the red star of any PLA soldier, it is via these identifiable signifiers that we establish our recognition. In the small portrait series we can recognise broad types, such as the Olympian with his medal or the red soldier in uniform, as well as specific role models such as Zorro wearing his mask and Maliang holding his magic paintbrush.
Such objects serve not only to allow others to recognise a figure, but also to allow us to adopt the less tangible characteristics of another person. As it is by holding one or more of such articles one “becomes” somebody else and is identifiable as such. Then a child may be rewarded with admiring looks and a remark like, “Oh, look! He’s a soldier!”
Later, larger portraits continue to present more wholly the themes of child’s play, and dressing up. Guo Jin returns to the idea of costumed children in the “Cosplay” series, and the large canvas works of 2005 and 2006, which are dominated by groups of children dressed for a school play and waiting to go on stage to act their part. It is due to subtle changes in the subject forms that I believe reveal the advancing process of “growing up” in the children portrayed. The “Backstage” series (Also referred to as “The Front of Stage” series, in a direct translation from the Chinese title) is executed in a minimal range of colours and the children look bored and disinterested in either the coming play or the excitement of dressing up, unlike the earlier portraits of children which capture the obvious joy of play. The specific temporal stance of these young children who are already not dressing up for play, but to play a certain role is further emphasised in the title of the following series of 2006 “Performance Getting Started”. It is as if the children can no longer escape the real world in their games, but are pressed to take their roles, it may look the same, but it’s no longer such heartless fun.
This has been identified by some as a sense of duality in the pictures, or as a sinister feeling to the otherwise innocent children, who appear frozen, waiting and no longer absorbed in their play. At some point we all must progress from playing at different roles to settling in our own, composed as it is of what we have learned along the way. At this point, the play no longer revolves around preparing us for life, but perhaps in liberating us from it. In that case the imaginary world is due to change with the growing self.
In 2006 we see the greatest shake up to the given themes of Guo Jin’s paintings since they became established in his mature works. The wooden bench upon which children drape themselves, laughing and playing, has been replaced with the tree as the central wooden frame in the structure. Rather than children, the unchanging motif of previous paintings we see animals, free of any form of restrictive classification, but taken from all the continents and hung from the one, crowded and lively tree, which stands variously on fairytale grass mounds and in still lakes or against surreal sky-scapes. It leaves me wondering when the animals and children will learn to play together; that would definitely be a scene of unaffected happiness.
If playing, assuming roles and modelling their characters is an essential part of the process of learning and defining the character for a child, then we are only looking at one side of Guo Jin’s paintings, understanding the child’s imagination is only the first step. As the audience enjoying some compassionate appreciation of the children at play, by casting our emotions into the paintings for our cathartic reward, we are describing our own aesthetic divisions, in selecting those things that we are glad to look at, and those that we are not. For we are not children watching other children at play, as adults we must consider why it is that we enjoy watching children play and act a part.
Imitation, it would seem, is not only the sincerest form of praise, but also an integral part of the continued development of a person. Aristotle’s early criticism of creative arts “On the Art of Poetry” records his observation, “[man] is the most imitative of creatures, and he learns his earliest lessons by imitation. Also inborn in each of us is the instinct to enjoy works of imitation.” Aristotle goes on to cite that it can also be the case that we enjoy an imitative expression of those things that would frighten or disgust us in life such as base animal behaviour and death. Imitation, or the enjoyment of an imitative act, then has something in common with memory and nostalgia, in that sometimes it is not the thing itself that we appreciate and adore so much as the imitated likeness of it, or the memory coloured by nostalgic yearning. For it is also true that not every moment that we remember with fondness and longing was necessarily a happy event or experience at the time. Aristotle suggests that we enjoy watching imitations, of both happy and unhappy things, because “in doing so we acquire information”. Perhaps by observing the likenesses of the past condition of childhood whether by the painted image or in our own memories, we are again afforded the opportunity to acquire information, and I would assert that it is information regarding the self and its state of development.
Perhaps more active in our enjoyment of watching children play a part, a character, is that it is a displaced experience. As adults we have grown to understand that ‘play’ as an activity must be relegated to the daytime fantasy or the night-time dream world. A third possibility is that it is something that others do, particularly those younger than us. So with a kind of parental affection we watch them, in full knowledge that these games may not last forever, in sympathy for the adult the child will grow into, and also with a certain degree of derived pleasure, we are playing vicariously through the children. For it may be possible that the play instinct is insatiable, even if repressed and given acceptable outlets in adult life. Whereas Tantalus stood surrounded by the pleasures of food and drink, unable to lay his hands on what would have satisfied his desperate cravings, we have played in childhood and continue to exercise the imagination in various outlets as adults. We are never completely able to satisfy the desire for play, which if it follows the same path as other desires is an abiding drive, with the greatest pleasure in its pursuit and almost certain not to be satisfied by the occasional attainment.
