Born: Chongqing, Sichuan province, 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. The objective appearance of remembered things is less important to Guo Hongwei than the way remembering fades and clouds that appearance: his first exhibition was titled “Dissolving Memories”. Through ceaseless experimentation, he’s developed some unusual techniques. In one series, he pooled diluted grey and blue oil paints, then, with remarkable control as well as a superb eye for detail, manipulated the fluid mix into ghostly yet lifelike images. “I am just trying to explore interesting things, and methods people have never used before,” he says. To create 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.”