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Guo Brothers at Goedhuis Contemporary
Art in America, June, 2003 by Jonathan Goodman
Guo Wei and Guo Jin, born in 1960 and 1964, respectively, come from Chengdu, a city in southwest China; both were educated at the Sichuan Academy of Fine Art in Chongqing. They are leading members of a group of Sichuan artists who have been at the forefront of recent artistic developments in China. Old enough to remember the Cultural Revolution, the brothers, like everyone else in China, have been affected by the one-family, one-child policy of the Mao era: the elder has made his only daughter's development a major theme in his art. Both frequently depict children.
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Guo Jin presents children playing, usually two figures in each composition. His guileless boys and girls gently sing, tug at each other and tumble in oils painted in soft, often pastel shades. But the empty backgrounds and bland, sometimes expressionless faces create a sense of unease in the viewer. In Children Play No. 3 (2002), a boy lying down and a girl crouched over him gaze at a ball in midair; in Children Play No. 4 (2002), a boy balances on his right hand and foot, like someone practicing tai chi or yoga. But the general treatment of the youths and the isolation of their pleasure undercut the euphoria or innocence that might be suggested by this subject rendered in light colors. The works hint that the situation is not what it seems.
Guo Wei is the more dramatic and darker of the two artists--literally so in his limited palette of black, white and gray. There is an undercurrent of threat in his work. In Untitled No. 15 (2001), his daughter wears a frilly white dress as she stands next to a boy who wears only a bathing suit, while an indeterminate small animal lifts its back leg before the two figures. The girl's features are oddly adult; she seems to have outgrown her outfit. In Untitled No. 16 (2001), she grimaces aggressively as she bites the tail of a dangling stuffed tiger, while an older boy, wearing swimming goggles, pulls at a toy rifle. Thin squiggles of paint and specks that suggest small insects--flies or mosquitoes--add to the faint unpleasantness of the scene. In both artists' works, something feels wrong. Guo Jin's children are distanced by the abstracting effect of neutrality, while Guo Wei's details make us pause, as if before something slightly repellent.
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