For Art Basel HK 2022 Chambers Fine Art will be partnering with Anna Ning Fine Art, Hong Kong. While there is no overlap in the programs of the two galleries, the joint exhibition will provide an opportunity to observe unexpected connections between several generations of Chinese artists, established modern masters of the twentieth century and a younger generation of contemporary practitioners.
Since Things, his first exhibition at Chambers Fine Art in 2009, Guo Hongwei's primary focus has been on painting although in _The Great Metaphoris_t in 2014 he adopted a multi-media approach including video for a metaphorical exploration of the daily commute between his home and studio.
In spite of this temporary diversion and occasional ventures into installation, he has continued to produce a varied group of paintings and watercolours in which manmade objects and materials from the natural world are transformed by his innovative handling of watercolour and unusual combinations of different pigments and media in his oil painting.
The paintings assembled for Art Basel HK 2022 are a striking departure from the watercolours that were shown before. Executed in oil on canvas, the works are a thoughtful development of ideas concerning subject matter and technical approaches to painting that have long characterised Guo's work.
Prior to 2009, the thematic content of Guo's painting had been highly personal, much of it derived from family snapshots. For the greater part of the next decade he favoured inanimate subject matter, for example inconsequential objects selected from the clutter in his studio or random images selected from the internet. The culmination of this approach occurred in 2017 with paintings.
Simultaneously, he began selecting images he found online that incorporated human or animal forms, specially the panda, that provided opportunities for developing the full range of the painterly skills that he had acquired while studying at the Sichuan Fine Arts Institute.
The individual works may be divided into two basic categories, depending on whether the source of inspiration was located online or offline. Even before the pandemic Guo was a devotee of Kuaishou, a video-sharing app wildly popular among young people in China.
Viewing himself as a researcher whose aim is to give as broad a view as possible of life in China during the pandemic, he refuses to prioritise among those he finds online and those he experiences and photographs himself.
Typical of the first group are Laughing at this World and The Master Practitioner, both inspired by an older man who, lost in his own world, danced solo on a Segway and achieved instant 'viral' fame on the Kuaishou platform.
Portraits in Isolation is a more intimate group of works that examine the impact that the continued lockdowns are having on humanity. Guo's use of the panda, a recurring theme in his work, is surprisingly effective in conveying the emotion of his subjects.
At this stage in his career Guo has adopted a new role, that of the contemporary history painter although he does not focus on heroic events, rather the opposite.
After a decade of experimenting with different approaches to painting on paper or canvas, he has now come to the realisation that it is impossible for a painter of his generation to forget everything that has been done in the past.
He has said that he is now more open to his unconscious, and recognises that every time he applies brush to canvas, the resulting mark might refer to traditional Chinese painting, to Western Old Masters, to manga, or naive art. Once assembled, he believes, they become evidence of his own distinctive personality.
