RESEARCHOne Bedroom Apartment and Public Painting

In September 2008, as a freshman in the art circle, Liao Guohe hosted his first solo exhibition, “Quietly Appeared Commercial Salon, i.e. Useless King on the Shore of the Fools — Wu Shanzhuan, Wang Xingwei and Liao Guohe Creation Selling Exhibition,” in Shopping Gallery founded by artists such as Xu Zhen, Shi Yong, and Yang Zhenzhong. This exhibition, “co-developed” by the artist and Xuzhen, is still categorized on artlinkart as a “group exhibition” participated by Wu Shanzhuan, Wang Xingwei and Liao Guohe based on the information they fabricated. Whereas the title, newsletter and even the artist’s profile were in fact all made up by Liao. He keenly captured the similar characteristics of a group of people (even including his gallery owner at that time Xuzhen and his MadeIn Company) — the criticism, self-examination, questioning and mocking on the interrelationship between contemporary art culture and the commerce and culture that surround it. Liao then makes use of an “Selling Exhibition” and includes himself in this — I observe, I satirize and I participate.

Liao Guohe has a unique visual style, which is not restrained by the cognition of images in art history or daily life directly. It seems that the viewers can easily read the paintings without any viewing experience of contemporary art. In his creations, there are a large number of “Liao style” signifiers, either extracted from art history, or from news and anecdotes, or have a historical background, or just his personal taste. We are looking at Leda’s swan, Cezanne’s apple, Russian bear, reproducing Justice, we are also looking at painting board dipped in urine, officials laying eggs, excreting nudes and human slides. In the study of art history centered on images, the immutable relationship formed between these symbolized images and their references can even rise to a conventional creation motif. Of course, Liao Guohe knows this rule quite well— “Untitled (Hole, Woman and Swan)” (2009) can be seen as a provocative copy of Leda and the Swan — a classic symbol of art history. However, in more cases, Liao Guohe’s use of signifiers often goes the other way. In his paintings, the shape of the word “Justice” has been merged into a figure by countless changes, the floor plan of a one-bedroom apartment embraces the world with open arms like the God, the building becomes a giant crushing the earth, and the lost red heart of the house is being transported elsewhere … These images are complex but easy to read, seemingly have a relatively complete narrative system while not clearly corresponds to certain references. Against the deliberately omitted background, the main subjects and signifiers in the paintings form a set of thinking collages that require the viewers to perform multi-dimensional “supplementation in the head” in its reading logic. And when the viewer thought that he/she had obtained the actual realistic reference through the fragmented signifiers, did he/she fall into the trap carefully woven by Liao?

In addition to the signifiers, text is also a highly recognizable part of Liao Guohe’s works. In terms of the use of words and languages in the context of contemporary art, Western post-war contemporary artists such as Barbara Kruger, Jenny Holzer, Christopher Wool have made explorations in various perspectives in the past decades. The readability of Holzer and others’ works is almost entirely contributed by their texts. They directly discuss issues such as identity politics, consumerism and rights of public discourse, all of which have high requirements for readers’ intelligence. Liao Guohe obtains a rich source of vocabulary from daily life which compiles into a personalized dictionary. He then exercises his authority over these lines in his works, and dismantles the immutability between the signifier and the signified. Liao tries to destroy the solid logical structure of the language through the montage of vocabulary, to create a void in the language, to suspend the meaning in midair, thereby providing the possibility of extending the meaning of the image.

Liao’s defamiliarized collage of texts not only open up interpretations, but also avoid the barriers of language to some extent. Meanwhile, the context and content provided by the highly refined signifiers make his paintings more visually ordinary and easy to access, so as to complete the concept of what he calls as “Public Painting”. Consequently, in his case, any “professional” interpretation or explanation is far less fresh and exciting than the complexity and “dirtiness” of the painting itself. It is no wonder that Liao Guohe insists that he is a “good Chinese painter” — only painting itself can carry and exceed the message that the artist wants to convey, which is far more than what the artist wants to say and what the audience think at the present. These broken logic chains are the prudence and restraint shown by the artist in the two-way observation of the object and the self, and keep the artwork in a neutral balance without becoming an excessively realistic image profile or a weak socialist proletarian slogan.

Liao Guohe’s One Bedroom Apartment depicts people’s desire for their own house at present. In China today, everyone believes that owning a place to live is the most basic and ultimate guarantee of their lives. Liao’s work “One Bedroom Apartment Blessing” endows the public the legitimacy of “divinity” in pursuing one’s own house — same as “God Bless America”, “Apartment Bless Us”. “One Bedroom Apartment” is a developed representation of the “house” from 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. Liao Guohe doesn’t point out the boundaries of justice, and he even tries to challenge the boundaries of the “evil” to define the scope of “justice”. Bourdieu believes that social capital is determined by economic capital and cultural capital. When the “poor people” who lack economic capital are facing the “power” that symbolizes the supreme social capital, is “justice” still manifested in the face of the “evil” constructed by capital, bureaucracy, social system and value cognition? A house is not only a place to live, but also the material exemplification of economic, cultural and social capital. For the poor, it is also a place of refuge that represents the bottom line for the right to live after having no right to alienate. In Liao’s previous artworks related to house, sometimes the image criticizes absolute power, sometimes full of longing and sometimes satirizes the society. For example, in the “Immoral House” (2008), the distant white house seems to be aimed by a sniper lying in the grass, waiting to be killed. Then it is because that house symbolizes desire, or does the existence of the house make people desire? Either way, the house should be classified as Kant’s “immoral” existence. In his solo exhibition “Ten Thousand Houses” in 2016, no image of house can be found in more than 20 paintings in the exhibition except in the poster. And the description, irony, criticism and sarcasm of “power” can be seen everywhere in the exhibited paintings. Liao’s house is not only a carrier of power, desire and emotion; the house he created can be regarded as an individual, a society, or even a nation, and also a set of moral and social value, national policy and economy, which represents every concrete or abstract barriers and constraints.

“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 has consistently maintained his grass-root perspective, looking at ordinary people’s anxious situation within the institution and their economy life from the perspective of “a person”, trying to resist the alienation of the power system and the resulting “evil” and “injustice”. His public painting represents, to the greatest extent, his provocation towards those disciplined intellectuals and highly educated social elites that were subservient to the “classical aesthetics”. At the same time, the prudent stance and unique perspective of his work proved exactly Liao’s sensitivity and intelligence.