Person

Born in 1967 in Liaoning Province, Wang Guofeng graduated from the Fine Arts Department of Inner Mongolia Normal University in Hohhot in 1991 before moving to Beijing to study painting at the Central Academy of Fine Arts. His unerring eye for dramatic composition in his series of photographs of Soviet-style architecture in Beijing reveals his training as a painter. ‘Ideal’ (a title that has sometimes been translated into English as ‘Ideality’) examines the history of Chinese socialism through documenting the ‘Ten Grand Buildings’ constructed in 1959 in Beijing to commemorate the tenth anniversary of the People’s Republic of China. These vast, often Soviet-inspired, edifices proclaimed the triumph of Socialism under Mao Zedong. For Wang Guofeng, born in the earliest and most violent years of the Cultural Revolution, these building remind him of the propaganda of his childhood, as do the photographic series that he has shot in North Korea and in the former Soviet Union. His works have been widely shown in group and solo exhibitions internationally, including in the Gwangju Biennale, South Korea (2018), ‘Mind Beating’ (a collateral event) at the 55th Venice Biennale (2013), the 2nd Moscow Biennial (2007), and the 6th Shanghai Biennale (2006). Wang received the award of Art China “Artist of the Year” for photography in 2014. He was also invited by the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (North Korea) in 2011 to photograph North Korean socialist architecture and in 2012 to document the 100th anniversary of the birth of Kim Il Sung. Wang Guofeng currently lives and works in Beijing.