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 the 1st of April. The exhibition mainly focuses on the paintings he made between 2016 and 2019, and also some earlier paintings that relate to this topic. The exhibition will last until 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 “Public Painting”. Meanwhile, Liao’s working-class point of view provides a broader space for the interpretation of this concept, which also allows viewers to be able to read the paintings without much viewing experience and knowledge of contemporary art.

As an artist, Liao Guohe maintained his proletarian point of view in almost all of his artwork. He uses the anti-elitist’s public painting and the working class’s perspective 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, and the well-educated people who are used to classic aesthetics. Simultaneously, the anti-elitist’s method and the standpoint on incidents also proved Liao’s intelligence and sharpness. This exhibition, “APARTMENT BLESS”, delineates people’s desire to have their own apartment in the present society. “One Bedroom Apartment” is a developed representation of the “house” in his previous works, and carries over symbols such as “justice”, “power”, and “poor people” which are intertwined and dimensionally reduced into the material level. “House” is a strong signifier that is extremely secular and can be expounded by everyone because its significance can be developed infinitely. It can remind you of the classic architecture by Le Corbusier, and also the incident of the young people from Wuhan buying their one-bedroom apartment for RMB 50,000 in the northern city of Hegang. In the exhibited 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 a statue of Jesus Christ in the middle of a huge church or a golden statue of Buddha in a grand temple. It’s the moment when divinity is given, and it becomes a faith. In three other exhibited 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 motif of the one-bedroom floor plan is transcribed like the scriptures, repeatedly copied for praying and for reminding one of the faith again and again.  However, such unreachable faith in the painting “The Quivering Hours” (2007) is like a rabbit waiting to be slaughtered, who can only tremble when encircled by “Power”. Similarly, in the two paintings of “Wild People Can’t Sleep at Night” (2016, 2017), such comparisons are expressed more emotionally — Poor people sleep under the arch of a bridge on a snowy night, but the propertied class stays in their icy mansion, sleeping well for the whole night. The bridge in the snowy night is rendered 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 in a pitch-black colour, anxiously, intolerably, and appearing abnormally icy.

Liao Guohe maintains 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 requirements of higher thinking for his viewers.