EXHIBITIONSLiao Guohe: Public Painting: APARTMENT BLESS

In 2020, SSSSTART Research Centre keeps carrying forward its Genealogy Study of Artist project, and will launch Liao Guohe’s solo exhibition “Public Painting: APARTMENT BLESS” on 1st of April. The exhibition mainly focuses on the paintings he made between 2016 and 2019, and also some earlier paintings which relate to this topic. The exhibition will last till the mid-May, 2020.

Liao has a very unique visual style which does not inherit the cognition of images in art history or daily life directly, but obtains a large amount of unique personalized image language from them. The artist uses naked, vulgar and satirical images and words to recode contemporary individual perceptions and social events, completing the concept of what he calls as “Public Painting”. Meanwhile, Liao’s grass-root class’s observing angles provides a broader space for the interpretation of this concept, which also let viewers be able to read the paintings without much viewing experience and knowledge of contemporary art.

As an artist, Liao Guohe maintained his proletarian and grass-root class’s observing angles in almost all of his artwork. He uses the anti-elitist’s public painting and the grass-root class’s viewing angle to withstand the politics, criticize the economics, satirize the authority and provoke the bureaucrats. These are also a provocation to the audiences who are the social elites, intellectuals, the well-educated people that used to the classic aesthetics. Simultaneously, the anti-elitist’s method and the observing angle of incidents also proved Liao’s high-intelligence and sharpness. This exhibition, “APARTMENT BLESS”, delineates people’s desire of have their own apartment in the present society. “One Bedroom Apartment” is a developed representation of the “house” in his previous works, and the carrier of the symbols such as “justice”, “power” and “poor people” being intertwined and dimensionally reduced into the material level. “House” is a strong signifier that is extremely secular and can be expounded by everyone because it’s signified can be developed infinitely. It can remind you of the classic architectures by Le Corbusier and also the incident that the young people from Wuhan bought their one-bedroom apartment for RMB 50,000 in the northern city Hegang. In the exhibiting painting “Yellow Floor Plan with Black Ground, One Bedroom Apartment” (2017), the gold-coloured one-bedroom floor plan in the centre of the totally black-coloured background is similar to the statue of Jesus Christ in the middle of a huge church and the golden statue of Buddha in a grant temple. It’s the moment when the divinity is given and making it become a faith. In other three exhibiting paintings “One Bedroom Apartment (Yellow Ground with White Edge)”(2017), “Untitled (Yellow Ground with White Edge)”(2017), and “One Bedroom Apartment Blessing”(2017), the repeated painting of the one-bedroom floor plan is just like transcribing the scriptures repeatedly for praying and for reminding the faith again and again.  However, such unreachable faith, in the painting “The Quivering Hours” (2007), is like a waiting-to-be-slaughtered rabbit who can only tremble when encircled by “Power”. Also, in the two paintings of “Wild People Can’t Sleep at Night” (2016, 2017), such comparison expressed more emotionally — Poor people sleep under the arch of a bridge in a snowing night but the propertied class stays in the icy-appearing mansion with a good sleep for the whole night. The bridge in the snowing night is in a warm colour. The floating square-shaped snowflakes from the sky are the endless yearning for a house by the poor people. However, the arch of the bridge is always dark, just like the night which wraps the mansion as dark as pitch, anxiously, intolerably, and appears abnormally icy.

Liao Guohe maintained a prudent attitude in the topics of “justice” and “evil”, “the poor” and “power”, “faith” and “reality”, etc., so as to keep the artwork in a neutral balance without becoming an excessively realistic image profile or a weak socialist proletarian slogan when discussing social issues. This is not only the audience’s interest in watching Liao’s works, but also the artist’s higher thinking requirements for his readers.