“I am just exploring interesting things and trying methods people have never used before.”
Born: Chongqing, Sichuan, 1982
Guo Hongwei is only in his twenties, but he is already nostalgic for his childhood. “When I look at photos of that time, I don’t remember any pain, any sadness. All I remember are the happy feelings,” he says. Much of his career has been a quest for ways to depict his recollections, not with the clarity of film but with the blurry uncertainty of memory itself: his first exhibition was titled “Dissolving Memories”. Through ceaseless experimentation, he has developed some unusual techniques. In one series, he pooled diluted grey and blue oil paints, then manipulated the mixture into ghostly yet lifelike images. For Paradise (2008), he painted the figures of playing children in polypropylene resin, then separated the hardened resin from its backing to create stand-alone figures: paintings as sculpture. More recently, he has shifted to watercolours, making pale, blurry pictures of multiple mundane objects, from toothbrushes to thimbles. “I like a wet effect,” he says. “I don’t like edges or anything sharp.”
