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after, while hiking in the mountains, his leg inexplicably snapped,
fractured. Recovering in hospital, he was visited by nightmares;
the paintings he made of these fever dreams show his own face in
the devil mirrors.
In 1992, Guo Jian migrated to Australia. He exhibited works from
this very personal series of paintings in his first solo exhibition, at
Headspace, the home-cum-gallery of the arts journalist Stephen
Feneley in Sydney. At the time Guo Jian was working as a house
painter and labourer, and learning English by listening to TripleJ.
Ray Hughes picked him up in 1998; Guo Jian showed with him
to 2004. Today the National Gallery of Australia, GOMA and
White Rabbit are among the Australian institutions that have
collected his work.
Back in 2014, the police threw Guo Jian into a cell, interrogated
him and considered laying serious charges. They kept him
sweating there for two weeks before charging him with visa
irregularities (he holds an Australian passport). They marched
him onto an Air China flight back to Sydney with instructions not
to return for at least five years. When Guo Jian tells the story, he
always mentions their final insult: ordering the flight attendants
not to allow him even a single beer on the way home.
Since settling back into life in Australia, Guo Jian has been
creating photography- and print-based work that draws on the
photographs he took in China of the piles of rubbish that are, he
says ‘obliterating the landscape of my youth’. He hadn’t known
what he was going to do with the photos. But zooming in on
a detail, he realised that all this discarded waste – magazines,
instant noodle packets, name it – was branded with the faces of
equally disposable celebrities. ‘You have all of these celebrities who
make their names in rubbish TV shows using their fame to adver tise
rubbish products, and now they too have become rubbish.’ The
first series inspired by ‘rubbish culture’ is ‘The Encroachment’
(2016). In it, he turns the faces into pixels with which to recreate
famous Song dynasty paintings like Liu Cai’s Fish Swimming
Amid Falling Flowers (2014) and Guo Xi’s Early Spring (2014).
In his home studio in Terrigal on the NSW Central Coast, where
he lives with his partner and two children, Guo Jian is working
on a related series of paintings in which traditionally-rendered
landscapes disappear behind advertisement- or slogan-covered
hoardings. Gone is the porny sensuality and crowded compositions
of some earlier work. These feature the ‘void’, the inhabited
emptiness that is integral to the traditional landscape aesthetic:
‘I want to give people space to think and reflect.’
This year was the thirtieth anniversary of the Tiananmen Square
massacre. Artist Profile invited Guo Jian to recreate The Meat
in Carriageworks for Sydney Contemporary. In the end, health
and safety rules meant it couldn’t happen in the way Guo Jian
wanted it to, complete with the stench of rotting meat, and ‘ideally’
infestations of vermin. Instead, Artist Profile will be presenting
some of his work on ‘rubbish culture’.
As for the failure to get The Meat into the show, Guo Jian describes
himself as ‘disappointed, but not shocked. Anywhere you go,
there are restrictions. Still, the process is what’s interesting. And
anyway,’ he observes, ‘I’m not done with it yet.’
guojianart.com
@guojianart
EXHIBITION
Sydney Contemporary, Artist Profile Booth G01
12 to 15 September 2019
Carriageworks, Sydney
09 The Erotic No.1, 2016, Inkjet pigment print, 200 x 150 cm
10 The Meat, 2014, mixed media installation (raw meat, PVC), 460 x 210 x 125 cm
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10