PR
OF
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E(^) G
uo
(^) Jia
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erotic heaven as a boy could get back then. Scenes from the ballet
feature in many of Guo Jian’s paintings, along with ejaculate-like
water fountains and explosions, and multiples of Guo Jian himself,
grinning, leering, tongue out, all his teenage dreams come true.
Guo Jian loved to draw from the time he was a child. But
becoming an artist seemed an impossible ambition for a boy from
such a poor, remote area. At seventeen, he enlisted in the PLA. It
was 1979. Mao Zedong was dead, and China’s new leader, Deng
Xiaoping, argued that the army needed to modernise. The generals,
loyal to Mao’s ideas about the primacy of guerrilla warfare and
human wave tactics, disagreed. So to prove his point, Deng sent
hundreds of thousands of under-equipped and under-trained
soldiers off to fight a border dispute with Vietnam, human wave
after human wave. A bloodbath ensued. By the time Guo Jian
signed up, the worst of it was over, but the border was still a tense
and deadly place.
In the army, Guo Jian acted as a signals officer, then a regimental
secretary and a painter of propaganda posters. They were grim
times. But when Guo Jian later returned to his memories of the
army in his work, he depicted neither heroism nor horror, but rather
ungovernable youth and exuberance – secretly listening to Taiwan
pop on the shortwave radio, erotic fantasies, and pranks like
smearing toothpaste on the soles of the feet of sleeping comrades
to give them wet dreams. ‘For years,’ Guo Jian says, ‘my old army
buddies and I would laugh about the fun we had back then. But
now they’ve changed, and abuse me for doing these works – how
can you depict soldiers like that? They consider it shameful.’
Leaving the army in 1982, Guo Jian got a job making propaganda
posters for a local transport company. A few years on, he was
carrying his sketch pad when he bumped into a former teacher.
With her was a recruiter from the Central Nationalities Institute
(now Minzu University) in Beijing. She was scouting for talented
young people from ethnic minorities, and Guo Jian belongs to the
Buyi nationality. It was a dream come true.
He arrived in Beijing in 1985 still wearing his army greens. The
capital was an exciting place to be, full of cultural and intellectual
ferment. He majored in gongbi hua, an ancient style of painting
characterised by fine brushstrokes, outlining and attention to
detail. He explains that gongbi hua continues to influence his
work, as does the quite different tradition of expressive landscape
painting. Gongbi hua gave him a habit of sketching and outlining
his paintings, and a technique of building up colour through
thin layers of paint. His compositions reject the classical Western
‘golden ratio’ in favour of the principle of yidian daimian, broadly
translatable as ‘fanning out from one point’.
Guo Jian was about to graduate in 1989 when the Protest
Movement erupted. He joined the hunger strike, and on 3-4 June,
narrowly escaped death at the hands of the army to which he once
belonged. He has often reflected how easily he might have been
behind one of those guns, instead of running from them. This
paradox has helped fuel his obsession with military iconography
and self-portraiture.
He was lucky. Allowed to graduate, he moved to an unofficial
artists’ community on the fringe of an old imperial palace. His
experiences in the capital gave him a new, critical perspective on
life back in Guizhou. On a visit back home, unable to persuade
his mother that her Buddhist altar, complete with ‘devil mirrors’
to repel evil spirits, was just superstition, he smashed it. Not long
(^) My old army
buddies and I
would laugh
about the fun we
had back then.
But now
they’ve changed,
and abuse me
for doing
these works.
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