Shi Guowei

Memories are vivid and fluid, yet photography captures only a single image. Shi Guowei combines photography and painting in an attempt to recreate three-dimensional memories through two-dimensional images. Festivals exist at the intersection of personal emotions and collective consciousness, layered upon one another, and can trigger physical sensations—which is also the texture of memory.

In annual festivals, the act of dispelling the fear of the unknown and the turbulent through collective, celebratory release — thereby achieving a cultural transformation and psychological catharsis of negative emotions — is a phenomenon that transcends both geography and era. This festive logic, deeply rooted in the collective unconscious, is widely present across many of the world's traditions. Amid firecrackers, song and dance, noise and shared drink, people momentarily dissolve loneliness, anxiety, and helplessness into the warm embrace of community, achieving a brief transcendence over the uncertainty of fate.

It is precisely through long-term observation of such cultural-psychological mechanisms — combined with his own memories and visual imagination, and informed by a meticulous capture of the hidden moments within China's urban and rural festivals and everyday life — that Shi Guowei attempts to evoke and recreate a highly charged psychological state in his new body of work. It is a state of contradiction: depression and euphoria tightly interlocked, emotions tearing against each other while pulling in opposite directions. Beneath the surface of revelry often lies a hidden, restrained solitude, while within quiet scenes, uncontrollable impulses surge. The artist does not depict the festival itself directly. Instead, through dislocations and conflicts of color, texture, and composition, he condenses these opposing emotions into a visualizable psychological tableau.

In the works featured in this exhibition, Shi continues his distinctive creative practice, which hovers between photography and painting. He neither relies entirely on the camera's mechanical recording of reality, nor fully surrenders to purely abstract subjective expression. Instead, he opens up a space at the boundary between the two — developing a hybrid visual language that holds both control and the loss of control, the specific and the ambiguous, the real and the perceptual. It is precisely through this "neither one nor the other" mode of expression that the artist subtly responds to the conflicts and divisions so prevalent in contemporary society: the boundaries between tradition and modernity, the countryside and the city, collective festivity and individual alienation, ritual and absurdity are deliberately blurred. In doing so, he summons the viewer into a psychological terrain that is at once familiar and unfamiliar, both tender and estranged. Beneath the surface narrative of the image lies a deep, unflinching gaze into the unspeakable fissures of contemporary human existence.

Yang Zi curated this exhibition.

ABOUT THE ARTIST

Shi Guowei (1977, Luoyang, Henan) currently lives and works in Beijing. He graduated with a bachelor’s degree in photography from the Department of Visual Communication at the Tsinghua University Academy of Arts & Design (the former Central Academy of Art and Design) in 2002, and he received his master’s degree in photography from the Fachhochschule Dortmund in 2006.

Shi Guowei further adapts the traditional photo-coloring process into a two-tiered structure, which means his process is neither capturing the fact as photography nor a creation out of nothing as painting. By re-coding the objectivity of original image with the colored layer with transparency, his work partitions the world into two layers: reality and perception. In this way, the artist attempts to negate the unique interpretation of a past fact, and illustrate manipulation is occurring right before our eyes. Despite the images as established facts are always visible, entirely different facts could be fabricated by a mere reconstruction of the object's textures using color layers. Shi Guowei names these unreal phenomena that descend upon reality as authentic illusion: sensory actions that re-initiate emotions based on each image. By this, he intends to interrupt the logic of reality with a configuration of color layers.

His work has been shown in solo exhibitions at Fotografiska (Shenzhen & Shanghai), Shanghai Center of Photography (Shanghai) and Magician Space (Beijing), and was included in exhibitions at He Art Museum (Guangdong), Aranya Art Center (Qinhuangdao), SONGEUN Art Space (Seoul), Minsheng Art Museum (Beijing), Choi Center, Cloud House (Beijing) , Song Art Museum (Beijing), OCT Art&DesignGallery (Shenzhen), Hayward Gallery (London), MAK Museum Vienna (Vienna), National Gallery of Victoria (Melbourne), Galleriad’ Arte Moderna Milano (Milan), Sydney & Adelaide Festival Centre (Sydney), Hong Kong Arts Centre (Hong Kong),etc.

His work is collected by White Rabbit Gallery, UBS- United Bank of Switzerland, National Gallery of Victoria, KADIST, De Ying Foudation, BY ART MATTERS, Yan Du Foudation, SCoP, Sigg Collection, Blackstone Group etc.

With Special Thanks

The wall coatings for this exhibition were provided by Nippon Paint China. Since entering the Chinese market in 1992, Nippon Paint China has been committed to its corporate mission of "Refreshing wonderful living space." Through continuous exploration and innovation, the company has developed a wide range of colors, products, and services tailored to the needs of the Chinese market and consumers, helping to bring the public’s vision of a better life to life.