Artist Profile – August 2019

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CHINESE-AUSTRALIAN ARTIST

GUO JIAN IS ONE OF THE GREAT

CHARACTERS OF AUSTRALIA’S

CONTEMPORARY ART SCENE.

HE’S A NATURAL STORYTELLER,

PERHAPS BEST KNOWN FOR HIS

WILDLY SENSUAL AND WITTY

PAINTINGS MIXING UP IMAGES FROM

REVOLUTIONARY MODEL OPERAS,

LEERING SELF-PORTRAITS, SCENES

FROM MILITARY LIFE AND SOFT

PORN IN RAUCOUS AND GARISH

VISUAL NARRATIVES. BUT HE HAS

A SERIOUS, VERY POLITICAL SIDE

TOO, AND THAT COMES FROM AN

EXTRAORDINARY LIFE STORY.

I

n the wee hours of 1 June 2014, the Chinese police banged on the door of Guo Jian’s

studio in the Beijing suburbs. The artist wasn’t surprised to see them. It wasn’t their

first visit. But the Financial Times of London had just published an interview that

included a photograph of his latest artwork, The Meat (2014), which commemorated the

events of 3-4 June 1989, when the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) turned its guns on

supporters of the pro-democracy student movement. Guo Jian had been one of those

students.

In 2014, the students’ goals were as far from being realised as ever. Still, it was fairly easy

to live in China as an artist – so long as you kept your mouth shut about subjects such

Tiananmen Square. As the twenty-fifth anniversary of the massacre approached, Guo

Jian decided he could no longer do that. Partly inspired by the meat sculptures of Sydney’s

Royal Easter Show, he spread 160 kilograms of minced pork over a scale model of

Tiananmen Square and let it rot. The artist knew that this dual act of defiance – creating

art that evoked the literal and metaphorical stench of massacre, and talking to the foreign

media about it – wouldn’t go unpunished.

Guo Jian’s story begins in a small town in China’s impoverished south-western Guizhou

province. Only four when Mao launched the Cultural Revolution in 1966, he grew up, he

says, in a ‘culture of violence’. It was also a sexually repressive age. As an adolescent, he

looked forward to performances of the revolutionary ballet Red Detachment of Women, in

which stern-faced, revenge-bent soldier-ballerinas performed arabesques with fists raised

and guns pointed, their uniform shorts straining against their thighs. It was as close to