Paradise
Guo Hongwei
郭鸿蔚
Production date
2008
Object Detail
Media
acrylic paint
Measurements
6 pieces, dimensions variable
Notes
When Guo Hongwei was a student at the Sichuan Academy of Fine Arts, he returned home for Spring Festival and found an album of old family photographs. This discovery kickstarted his interest in how memories could be rendered in paint. Initially he painted a series of portraits based on his childhood photographs, blurring oil paint with turps to symbolise the insubstantial nature of fading memories. Later he took his experimental approach to the practice of painting to extreme lengths, creating sculptural installations made of hardened acrylic paint, peeled away from its backing once it was dry. In ‘Paradise’ he presents images of six children at play, climbing trees, clambering on rocks and swinging in a playground. These grey and white ‘paintings’ are suspended from the ceiling, shifting in each breath of air, appearing as ephemeral and hard to grasp as memory itself.
Accession number
2009.028