Archives
Over the past years, I have been trying to break the boundaries between
photography and painting, to tear down that dated and stale wall in-between them. In a more precise way, I’m straddling the borderline, keeping balance as if I were a tightrope walker on the wire, not to lean towards either side, not photography, nor painting.
-- Shi Guowei
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.
-- By karen smith