Exhibitions
Solo Exhibition
Shi Guowei: 2021-2023
2023.9.16 – 10.21
Shi Guowei’s recent creations on uninhabited scenes stem from his re-evaluation of local reality upon returning to China. Prior to this, he explored a collection of portraits that imitated Western classics with Chinese elements. Later, he realized that the richness of reality far exceeds cultural representation.
The uninhabited scenes mark an important turning point for Shi Guowei: with the absence of cultural features, these scenarios paradoxically detached from characteristic ideologies, accommodating the ambiguities of reality. Concurrently, the shift also makes Shi’s method of hand-coloring black-and-white photographs less constrained by subject matter. Here, color breaks away from reality and becomes the artist’s psychological reaction to the objective image.
In this exhibition, Shi further adapts the traditional photo-coloring process into a two-tiered structure, partitioning the world into two layers: reality and perception. Within this world layer, the artist endeavors to disrupt the objectivity of reality by manipulating stones into flesh, woods into heterogeneous spaces, and icefall into digital forms. Shi Guowei names these unreal phenomena that descend upon reality as events: sensory actions that re-initiate emotions based on images. By this, he intends to interrupt the logic of reality with a configuration of color layers.
While Shi Guowei makes subjective alterations to objective images, it is not a creation out of nothing as painting. His process lives in an intermediate state: utilizing images coded through optics as his foundation and re-coding them on the colored layer with transparency. In this way, Shi illustrates that manipulation is occurring right before our eyes. Despite the images being always visible, entirely different interpretations could be fabricated by a mere reconstruction of the object’s textures using color layers from the reality. In other words, this is a two-tiered structure akin to an encoder that translates the dynamic relationship between reality and perception, splitting new images from the dogmatic reality. For Shi Guowei, this represents an authentic illusion. Yet the real power of this structure is that it exposes another definition of transparency:
Transparency. As a concept, its visibility generates trust, circulation, and standards that sustain contemporary society. However, through his practice, Shi points out that transparency does not serve as a guarantee of truth. Instead, it is a channel through which manipulation leads to the reality.
Shi Guowei Solo Exhibition “The Drawn Out Moment”
at Shanghai Center of Photography (SCoP)
2021.2.06
“The Drawn Out Moment” brings together 21 works by the artist, created between 2006 and today, for what will be Shi Guowei’s first major retrospective and the largest showing of his work in China to date.
Shi Guowei describes his artworks as “photo-paintings”. He wanders in the interspace between photography and painting, keeping a delicate balance between them. He first makes a black-and-white photograph using a large format camera. Once the photograph has been printed to his satisfaction, he begins the second act of creation, the work of painting on the photograph to transform the black-and-white base into a richly colored new photograph. The process can take several months and requires the artist’s steadfast coordination of eye and hand. Through the lightest touch of the brush, one delicate layer after another with great concentration, there is no means of altering mistakes, no room for correction for Shi Guowei’s work.
For more ……
A Walk in the Woods
Curated by Karen Smith
2019.3.22 – 5.11
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 them over an extended period of time. This process requires coordination of eye and hand through the camera lens and 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 the label “hand-coloured photo”.
Outwardly, superficially, the subject 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 the physical resemblance of nature, than with finding means to illuminate an inner world of abstract experiences and 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 process of colouring, his “photo-paintings” are imbued with a metaphysical force, and an aura of the sublime.
Shi Guowei: Crossing Four Girls Mountain
Curator: Zhuang Hui
2016.7.09 – 8.21
As the mind opens, the artist uses the eye to photographically capture images of interest – information is then stored in the memory of a ‘micro-chip’. It involves a continuous accumulation of things, but also a perpetual procedure of screening, verification, and layering, which together enhances the process of image recognition.
Starting in 2013 with the work Flag of Sweat (2013), Shi Guowei has attempted to incorporate the “Cavalier Perspective” into photography, a perspective often found in Chinese scrolls – creating within scenes an array of images, which can be read in a dynamic way. Later in Low-Pressure (2015), one of the first works in a new series, or whether facing the ‘Four Girls Mountain’, a forest, objects or scenes from around the artist, he employs a similar method to photography throughout. As a result, he neither tries to ‘devise’ a subject nor does he overtly emphasize the connection to the work’s structure – in this way, the objects photographed in the scenes appear imperturbable like the everyday.
Shi Guowei studied photography at Fachhochschule, Dortmund. For his graduation, he took inspiration from the technique of hand-coloring photographs influenced from his parent’s generation. Through processes of using Kodak C-print, he first chemically develops the black and white print onto photographic paper – this becomes the ‘base color’ – before final hand painting the final layers to complete it. It is a traditional hand technique, which shares more than one hundred years of history with black and white photography – and it reappears again to beguile a new audience. For a long period of time, photography has become associated as an ‘objective’ form of reproducing objects. Taken this idea further, today the photographic technologies have reached a point of practically becoming an omnipotent presence in our lives. Shi Guowei uses his own work to challenge this point – “There is still distance between color perceived with the naked eye, which far surpasses that of the lens. Color obtained in color photography still falls short to the vivid qualities of nature – in fact it pales in comparison. On the contrary, through the mind and its memory of the photographed scene, color is mixed and applied according to what feels appropriate to the scene – adding lucidity to the image as well as a heightened accuracy.”