Guo Wei & Guo Jin

Brothers, Guo Wei and Guo Jin graduated from the Sichuan Academy of Fine Arts and are both recognized to be among the distinguished school's most celebrated artists. For the current exhibition Guo Wei and Guo Jin have created new bodies of work that mark a conceptual and visual shift from the recent practices of each.

Guo Jin, born in 1964 in Chengdu Province, creates beautiful versions of landscapes and birds that communicate, in their idiosyncratic, lyrical way, a new vision of the conventions of Chinese painting. His compositions are characterized by a veil-like layer of "rust," which through its textured surface endows the paintings with a sculptural quality. Guo Jin opts for a gentle perception, one in which the figure is treated with a poetic hand. Elegant, sophisticated versions of continuing themes in Chinese art leave his audience entirely taken with his pictures of birds in natural settings. His work carries on the tradition of natural imagery, yet the spirit of his work is resolutely his own. As viewers, we are charmed by the seeming ease of his compositions, which relate an innocence in regard to the depiction of his particular theme: the beauty of the environment and its inhabitants. As a result, viewers find themselves seduced by the seeming artlessness of his portrayals, which communicate a contemporary understanding of theme and image despite the conventional aspects of his art.

The psychological presence of Guo Jin's subjects seems relatively tame when they are compared with the raucous, angry energies of Guo Wei; Guo Jin seems interested in less distanced, more poetic renderings. His moments of beauty feel romantic without being sentimental, so that his expressiveness as an artist comes across as contemporarily inspired, influenced by both western and Chinese traditions.

Born in Sichuan Province in 1960, Guo Wei has exhibited internationally since 1988. His compositions are realistic, resembling photographs, yet upon closer inspection they reveal disturbing distortions and indistinct facial expressions that may surprise the viewer. While his earlier work primarily depicted children, Guo Wei's recent paintings record the awkward egotism of adolescence. But the essence of his painting, no matter how distanced it may seem, turns on the treatment of private emotion. His latest works are executed in monochromatic tones that intimately depict the subject of his daughter and friends. Guo Wei has been concerned with rendering his daughter as directly, and fiercely, as possible in black-and-white acrylic paintings; there is a disturbing quality to many of them, which bring forth a young girl, grimacing or acting aggressively to the point where she seems hostile both to the painter and his audience. There is a distinct negativity to Guo Wei's views, but it is a negativity underscored by brilliant compositions and provocative themes.

Guo Wei's edgy, nervous portraits of Chinese youths feel utterly original, while Guo Jin's work evokes the past without succumbing to nostalgia in any way. Guo Jin becomes a historically oriented painter who nonetheless paints with western media. Guo Wei, on the other hand, paints angst-filled reports on the state of youth in modern China; his portraits of the disaffected, however, could easily be rendered anywhere on earth.