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Article丨A Walk in the Woods with Shi Guowei -- by Karen Smith

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A Walk in the Woods with Shi Guowei (Excerpt)

By Karen Smith

In the recent years, since his return from studies at the Fachhochschule Dortmund in Germany, Shi Guowei has evolved a singular, and compelling, style of visual expression. This resides in a subtle, and deft, combination of photography and painting. Specifically, between black and white photographs that he makes in conventional fashion by observing scenes and documenting his observations, and an approach to hand-colouring the photographs that unfolds over an extended period of time. This process requires steadfast coordination of eye and hand, first through the camera lens and then via the highly controlled daubing of a brush. And, similar to the successful deployment of many artistic forms through history, the combination of materials and execution together expresses much more than might be assumed from a pragmatic description, or the label "hand-coloured photo".

Outwardly, superficially, thesubject of Shi Guowei’s recent endeavour, as evidenced in the group of new works presented in "A Walk in the Woods", is landscape, or rather nature, used in a generic or slightly abstract form that eschews the particular. Within the context of Shi Guowei’s immediate cultural framework, this content and approach to using it may not be surprising, since, in terms of the traditional arts, of ink and literati painting, landscape is almost always esoteric, a resource deployed to conjure a spiritual state via means of a metaphoric, rather than a purely descriptive, lexicon of motifs.Similarly, Shi Guowei is less concerned with depicting a physical resemblance of nature, than with finding means to illuminate an inner world of experiences and abstract emotions. This, he does, with a quiet, subtle skill. So much so that, courtesy of his masterful combination of straight documentary photography with a lengthy manual process of colouring, his "photo-paintings" are imbued with a metaphysical force, and an aura of the sublime.

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Clitter, 2018, painting on photograph, 189 x 354cm

Shi Guowei himself uses the terms "photo-painting" to describe his works. Each individual piece begins from a photograph, and is always one he has taken himself first, by going out and discovering a place. This physical motion, as an act of self-immersion in nature and the climatic atmospherics of a particular location, is important to the process of identifying the scene that will be the basis of a composition. Working with a large format camera, he makes a careful set of frames. None of the final photo-paintings are intended to present the scene as it might have appeared to the artist on site, nor how it might appear to us were we to find ourselves on the same spot. Shi Guowei is an artist who turns to a camera as a tool for producing source material rather than a finished product.

Once the photograph is made, then the painting portion of the process begins. The thinking here is not a simple appropriation of one medium to another. Shi Guowei spent several years obtaining a masters’ degree in photography in Germany, where he acquired mastery of photographic techniques and experienced an immersion in the craft of dark-room printing.One of those techniques was the hundred-odd-year-old method of applying coloured ink to black-and-white photographs, which made them appear to be colour photos and a livelier rendition of reality. This practice naturally began in an era when colour photography had yet to be invented and was hard to imagine. And, when the slightly surreal results of the added-on hues were not only understood as manmade additions, but were wholly accepted as approximations of the real, in spite of their affected exaggeration and strangeness. The pigment toning of black-and-white photos was a feature of photography in China early in its history, when technicians showed remarkable mastery of inking (relatively) life-like layers across monochrome images. Not least, through the mid-20th century, which produced a rich array of ideologically-inspired pictures, hand-coloured by turn to the tenets of a positive, warm glow and unmistakable revolutionary timbre. In this period, the saturated tonality was rather perfectly suited to the visual requirements of the political messages that images were conceived to convey. The approach that Shi Guowei pursues takes a rather divergent course, eschewing the decorative or the ideological, in favour of a form far more illusory.

Caochangdi, 2018, painting on photograph, 181 x 145cm

Like many young artists, Shi Guowei began with grand concepts, and the idea of art’s role in making big statements, its ability to change the world, each piece its own manifesto. Thus, early works attempted to explore, to visualise, social and cultural issues, but were, he felt, too illustrative, never transcending a literal narrative which the artist directed or constructed in too conscious a fashion. Perhaps he was already becoming aware of the limitations of time-specific social or political topics, or moved by intuition to make a change to his way of working. Either way, he found himself paying more attention to his own feelings life’s encounters, in Shi Guowei’s words, following a desire "to find and feel the resonance between things, and to find means to convey temperament through an image." It is this journey that has brought him to the recent works in "A Walk in the Woods", which certainly achieve his goal. Here, contradictions are discreetly embedded, and emotionssubtly concealed in images that, at first glance, are seemingly calm and attractive. "But look closely and there’s an intense anxiety behind those images," Shi Guowei suggest. In point of fact, this was also perfectly represented by previous works like Blue Forest 2016 and Grey Forest 2014, or even the seemingly straight forward Summer 2015. The tonality here projects a seductively surreal allure over scenes that are profoundly claustrophobic, cloyingly dense and promise to consume anyone fool enough to be lured into the promise of paradise they dangle before the eyes. A similar intense sensation emanates from the recent example Overlapping Plantlife (相互重叠的植物). In fact, the aura of almost all Shi Guowei’s recent works centres on various degrees of intense sensation, whilst offering thoughtful, and thought-provoking, points of reference to the external world, often in the form of forest, wood or tree.

Blue Forest, 2016, painting on photograph, 139.1 x 155.5 cm

Grey Forest, 2014, painting on photograph, 138.3 x 150.6cm

Of course, in the cultural context of China, courtesy of the ink tradition, landscape retains a distinctive metaphoric resonance. Through his choice of subject for his photo-paintings, Shi Guowei seems to recognise this. His pictures transport us into a world of nature, of landscapes, of trees large, small, near and far, and in extraordinary detail, whilst simultaneously remaining somewhat abstract. They are aligned with that unconscious impulse that drove me to walk in a wood, being both about their subject, and having nothing to do with it at all. They signify nature, the objects they depict, but at the same time so much more. "My manual intervention (in images that appear to document reality) suit my way of looking at the world," he says, "as well as my understanding of colour and its affect upon the senses. I use the familiar language (of nature and photography) to tell stories beyond words. The images are a sign language."

Roadside, 2019, painting on photograph, 150 x 294cm

Manufactured Landscape, 2015, painting on photograph, 150 x 150cm

One of the ways in which Shi Guowei’s photo-paintings share comparable traits with literati paintings is the invitation they extend to meander through the pictorial space – for the most part; there are exceptions, as we shall see. An example like Manufactured Landscape2015 shows the more idyllic end of the emotional spectrum. Unobtrusive, modest, and comforting. We pass through the surface, over the objects, into a neutral space beyond to which the scenes provide an overture. And then we lose ourselves in our own thoughts. The recent works exude more jarring sensations. While Shi Guowei seems to invite viewers to talk a walk in the woods, some works actively repel us. One might compare the shimmering beauty of Birch(桦)with Growth (生长), the latter a dense, almost monochrome piece in which the density of the trees conspires to keep us out. Following on, a work like Woods in Sunlight(阳光下的树林)opens up to us slightly, but still does not exactly extend a warm welcome to explore its sun-dappled glades. Where others works appear to open up, they feel somehow coy, and evoke the fragility of nature rather than its enduring spirit. To enter would be to infringe upon place, to cause damage in some way. This is more or less disturbing depending on your attitude towards trees or woods in general. As American author Robert Louis Stevenson wrote back in the 19thcentury; "It is not so much for its beauty that the forest makes a claim upon men's hearts, as for that subtle something, that quality of air that emanates from old trees, that so wonderfully changes and renews a weary spirit." I think this statement is prescient, and particularly apt for those sensitive to China’s cultural roots.

Birch, 2018, painting on photograph, 156 x 125cm

Growing, 2019, painting on photograph, 96 x 83cm

Shi Guowei himself would never be so explicit in intent. Like the subtle, almost invisible nature of the colour he adds to his works, any direct comment or concept he seeks to express is barely apparent, to be intuited, possibly. And then, depends on your own perspective. What is not in doubt in the illusion at work across all the photo-paintings, nor the quality of the sublime which unites them. In the sixth century BC, the influential Chinese thinker Laozi offered the idea that the world external to our individual consciousness is but illusion. This topic has been the subject of philosophical endeavour in every culture and almost every age since, in philosophies that sought to articulate the interior-exterior relationship between Mankind and the world-outside-of-ourselves. Treatises on the subject, like that of Laozi, have become integral to the concepts that artistic expression, through history, and especially in China, came to embody. Today, the doubts Laozi expressed towards human perception of reality two thousand years ago resonate with this digital age of image-making and the manipulation to which any image maybe subject before it assumes it role as purveyor of truth before the societal gaze. The border between truth and illusion has never been so fluid.From a further point of discussion, we might compare a photo-painting like Cactus Garden (仙人掌公园) with Grass/Field(草地), or the more abstract Mountain of Flowers (山花), before moving on to the further abstract,wholly emotive aspects of Foam (泡沫),or Lichen. These are poetic provocations in every way, beautiful and subtle in their sensations.There is resonance here in the concept and the effect that the visual has upon cerebral experience with the concept of poetic imagination articulated by French philosopher Gaston Bachelard (1884-1962). Bachelard attempts to explain how the imagination is formed through a convergence of the language we speak being laid over experiences that are as much visual, as literary and perceptual. And, how these elements, as the data upon which the brain draws to understand/read/interpret what is seen of the world exterior to oneself, acquire their rose-tinted nature; and how this capacity for imagining, in a poetic sense, the external world within a particular space and time, and beyond recourse to verifiable or scientific fact. It refers to how these experiences feed the interior landscape of memories we retain, which then shape the way we look at the world; or what we seek to see when we look.

mm Cactus Garden, 2016, painting on photograph, 156 x 152.5 cm

Weeds, 2018, painting on photograph, 161 x 150cm

Foam, 2018, painting on photograph, 167 x 130cm

Lichens, 2018, painting on photograph, 164 x 135.5cm

The hint of literati values that infuses a very contemporary practice is marked where Shi Guowei says "Working slowly is a very precious thing. Human life is so short that we only have the chance to appreciate the meaning of living when we slow down. I work to describe what words cannot; to activate dulled nerves. It is one of the central meanings of art." Perhaps that is why nature has a compelling voice in Shi Guowei’s art. As German author Hermann Hesse once wrote, "Trees are sanctuaries. Whoever knows how to speak to them, whoever knows how to listen to them, can learn the truth. They do not preach learning and precepts, they preach undeterred by particulars, the ancient law of life."

This is, succinctly. the law that lends Shi Guowei’s art its ethos and raison d’êtré.

Courtesy the artist and Magician Space

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