A place without wind
Exhibition time: 2022.2.22-2022.3.27
Opening time: 2022.2.22
Exhibition venue: Nanjing Baolong Art Center - No. 50-52, Ninghai Road, Gulou District, Nanjing
From February 22 to March 27, 2022, Nanjing Baolong Art Center presents young artist Guo Yujian's solo exhibition "A Place Without Wind", which will feature nearly 30 works by artists since the epidemic, including a new series of works on public display for the first time.
As a young artist after the 90s, Guo Yujian is slightly "traditional". He loved classical expressions, was obsessed with the divine, and often drew imagery and inspiration from literary and artistic works that he loved and was familiar with, with a unique European temperament.
Exhibition site
At the same time, the unique acumen of the artistic creator also makes him constantly look from the fortress he has built up in his own spiritual world. Each collective pulse impulse perceived in the tremor caused by social events led him to re-examine the relationship between himself and his surrounding environment, which was embodied in his works as a fluid emotion.
Since the epidemic has descended, the daily life of the past has gradually become strange, and at the same time, the new impermanence has begun to normalize. In addition to the virus itself, some man-made prevention and control policies have also penetrated into all aspects of life with great "aggressiveness" - they are like an elusive flood, which may disrupt the "routine" of you and me in society at any time. At this point, experience becomes more powerless than ever. At this stage, Guo Yujian began to rethink the relationship between intuition and experience. "A place without wind" is more direct than the metaphorical narrative in the previous creation, no longer seeing the intentionally designed content and plot, and all the figurative images in the painting are "descended" by extremely thin pigments dipped in a large amount of color toner oil, randomly smeared on a blank canvas. Every creation is a game between intuition and experience, chance and control.
"A Place Without Wind" was inspired by Three Dreams by Descartes.
The triple dream swept from the storm to the calm of the wind and waves, suggesting inner turmoil until the dust settled.
Where there is no wind, it symbolizes the mooring of searching, and "beside the girls" is on the way of searching.
Guo Yujian attempts to explore a unique aesthetic similar to proust's literary work in his paintings on the shelf—still leaving the reader with a poetic reverie space in a long narrative of every detail. This is indeed a poetic expression, a combination of triviality and continuity, neither literary nor irrational, a natural empathy.
This exhibition will combine the unique architectural structure of The Powerlong Art Center, through the three-story space, construct the artist's three-story dream, through the arches, from the dream into reality.
About the artist
Guo Yujian, born in 1992 in Changsha, Hunan Province, graduated from the Oil Painting Department of the Academy of Fine Arts in Florence, Italy in 2015, and now lives and works in Changsha.
Guo Yujian's creations are mainly figurative paintings. "Ambiguity" is a motif that Guo Yujian will continue to think about during the creative process. For him, ambiguity is a background for getting along with each other, and it is also a subtle starting state when all emotions occur—infinity is close to zero. The artist tries to visualize this background color through the combination of various objects and colors, as well as the contrast between brush stroke changes and color brightness and saturation. Earlier paintings often featured objects with distinctly religious and mystical cues and more obscure episodic narratives, which gradually transitioned to more direct and personal emotional expressions.