Guo Longyao: Peace of Mind and Confrontation

People’s past is always a blur.

Guo Longyao, who came out of his hometown in Tongwei County, Gansu Province, seldom went back to his hometown after attending university. The memory of his hometown is like a Wong Kar-wai movie, with dappled light and shadow, extremely short dialogues, and an air of introverted silence, warmth and some biting coldness – a hometown that cannot be returned to, and a spiritual displacement.

Memory is unreliable. The hometown condenses into a classical painting in the recollection of the past, remote, idle and eternal. The mute, generous, soft, and kind of Northwesterners is the kernel of this painting, and the roiling yellow earth is its base color.

In the Spring Festival of 2014, Guo Longyao lived in a small apartment in Heiqiao and did not go home. When it was snowing heavily, everything was quiet, and the atmosphere of depression and indifference caused a warmth to emerge in Guo Longyao’s heart, as he escaped from reality in the transcendence of time and became the center of everything. This feeling, mixed with the memories of the Northwest, shapes Guo Longyao and his painting temperament in an indescribable way.

Molding, cutting, breaking, reshaping, the constant way. The experience of the physical body is constantly projected into the picture, and the image is adjusted over and over again before it gradually reveals its personalized appearance.

It was also during this year that Guo Longyao was at a loss for a while, and he began to detach himself from his inner feelings in pursuit of new and trendy images. He called it a “fork in the road”. A friend’s comment, “You can’t paint like that,” hit Guo Longyao in the heart like a Zen Buddhist verse. He destroyed all the works he created during this period.

“At that time, the paintings were only on the surface of false and light images, and when I looked at them again later, I would feel flushed, as if they were sending out a moral question to myself. It was only after that part of the work that I realized what a good painting was for me.”

The inner and northwestern memories became the main theme of Guo Longyao’s paintings. His paintings have gradually taken on the qualities of firmness and softness. The firmness comes from the projection of Guo Longyao’s pursuit of faith and love in his paintings, while the softness comes from his sincerity towards the soft souls of all things. “Facing the canvas is like facing a third person, it is very concrete and seemingly non-existent. At this time, one is mute and can only paint reverently over and over again, with peace of mind and without self-deception.”

Peace of Mind

Guo Longyao’s works are rooted in his life and survival experience. The warmth that flows from his heart towards painting and his hometown allows Guo Longyao to capture the flow of time behind the images and materials he touches. In this flow, Guo Longyao is in the middle of it, breathing in and out of it. “It is constant and pure, transcending time and space, but also a display of restlessness presenting a momentary view of itself, a relaxing place to live.”

Guo Longyao’s paintings always have a sense of the roughness of the northwest land, there seems to be some kind of human hardness, noble will metaphor in it, calm and simple but also gorgeous and prosperous, like evergreen bamboo, not thankful flowers. “I am fascinated by the materiality of the earth, and the roughness is not restlessness.” Such roughness, together with the large blocky shapes and large yellow surfaces, gives Guo Longyao’s paintings a kind of Northwest-style mute and silence, like a sheep in the wilderness standing under the full moon, looking into the distance in solitude.

In recent years, he seldom paints nature or scenery outside the wall, but focuses his eyes on the side of the wall of the houses in the residential courtyard, especially on the windows. The light from outside hits the window and reflects out, leaving a shadow on the wall. The change of light and shadow hides the silence of time and space, leaving traces on the windows of the Northwestern Zhuangyuan-style buildings.

The window itself condenses human sight, the gaze of the people inside the house looking out, and the port of the people outside the house peering in. It is the physical window and the medium through which people see each other. In the northwestern countryside, the window more implies a layer of communication meaning, friends and neighbors visiting, always like to talk through the window. Because most of the window is the medium of sunlight into the house, every spring and winter, the Northwest always love to sunbathe under the window. Northwest people’s lives, around the window, in the warmth of time quietly scrolling.

Window is time, but also space. Window embedded in the wall, only one, but it is a dividing line, it will split the space in half, separating the outside and inside the house, public and private, distant and close. This end of the window unfolds the socialization between the family and the outside world, which is polite, courteous, and disconnected. In it, people often hide part of their reality, performing according to the rules of social conventions; the other end of the window is extremely private, people are fully exposed, and get along with the closest people in their lives in the most genuine, most comfortable interior, which carries sincerity, expectation, censure, love and hope.

Windows and walls, in Guo Longyao’s writing, are sometimes localized, and sometimes they are attached to the doors of the walls, but he always refrains from painting the original appearance of the Northwest buildings. The effect of this treatment is to make the public life outside the house appear naturally, while leaving the space-time inside the house in a state of obscurity and imagination – no one can tell what is really happening on the other side of the window. This is a kind of trade-off in the composition and space of Guo Longyao’s paintings, as well as a response to his paintings.

The window is the physical window in Guo Longyao’s paintings, but it is also the window in which he looks back at himself spiritually, and in which he places himself. “Painting is a unified presentation of my physical state and inner consciousness, and the only way to feel real is to keep concentrating. It is as clear as looking into a mirror and seeing your own eyes; there can be no deception done. Painting is also in a sense a portrait of myself, an infinitely enlarged version of myself in the depths of space.”

Kwok Lung Yiu is fond of the works of the Renaissance masters. He said that the light in them touched him and overlapped with some of his feelings. I asked him what he meant by “light”. I asked him what he meant by “light”, and he said, “Maybe it’s the spirituality behind the light and shadows of the images, a kind of solidity, elegance, truthfulness and beauty”.

Following this light, Guo Longyao’s brushstrokes often come and go, over and over again, each stroke is never empty, sincerely and practically reflecting his every thought and every state of life. “The thoughts are absolutely clear, but of course the subtle thoughts are also mixed with resistance, subjugation, and integration.”

I asked him rhetorically if this style of painting was too laborious, too emotionally and energetically draining. He replied, “This may be my original sin, I can only paint this way to have peace of mind.”

Confrontation

Behind the roughness is softness, and behind the softness is confrontation – confrontation with oneself, confrontation with the trend.
When he was a child, Guo Longyao would always help his family carry some crops home from the fields after school in the afternoon. The distance was long, the slope was steep, and the crops on his back were even bigger than Guo Longyao when he was a young boy, so he walked step by step, like a snail.

At that time, Guo Longyao would not know, such a state will become his later life portrait. For many years, he carried the memory of his hometown land on his back, fighting with himself little by little in the language and emotional expression of his oil paintings, accurately telling the fullness of his inner self. He grows and progresses slowly, just like carrying crops on his back when he was a child, just like Sisyphus pushing a stone to move with difficulty.

Guo Longyao says that finishing a painting is like carrying a stone on one’s back while walking a long distance, finally landing on the ground and feeling relaxed and happy for a moment, but when looking back, one has to pick it up again and continue on the road, over and over again, with no end in sight. He fights against himself and devotes himself to painting, wrapped in expectation, peace, struggle, surrender, and turning into freedom. “Every inch of this side of the brush belongs to me, look inside myself to my heart’s content.”

Sincerity is enough for Guo Longyao to reveal his state of mind in each of his paintings. Occasionally, when he glimpses a work from the past and re-looks at it for a while longer, his mind goes blank for a moment, followed by a touch of inexplicable emotion. “I don’t know where this kind of thought comes from, it may be the unspoken free form behind the image or some kind of beauty that feeds your soul”.

Mute, awkward and silent, this is the result of Guo Longyao’s constant struggle and confrontation with himself, as well as his way of fighting against trends, impatience and fast-food culture.

Not very talkative and seemingly indifferent to everything, Guo Longyao is not really mute, but he is unusually sensitive to painting. When talking about the current situation of painting today, he seems a little excited, “painting is dead is not painting is dead, but the living people painting dead painting, a thousand pieces of the same, painting and their own do not have any relationship, just follow the trend of chasing after the popular mechanical production, ruthless can also be said to be the dead painting dead painting, because the painting inside the environment has completely lost their own survival of the life of the living environment, the human being as the main body The breath of life!”

There is no difference between the subject and the painting, and Guo Longyao, who puts all the emotions of his heart in his paintings, is naturally very disgusted by “dead paintings”. He insists that what is lacking in Chinese contemporary trendy paintings is the care for human beings, to put it in a larger sense, love, no deep reflection on love, happiness, life, faith, and just applying the results of Western mature artists. “This leads to a large body of work that looks like a tree without roots, and it is difficult to stand up”.

But I don’t ask. Guo Longyao never talks about this. It was only when I repeatedly asked him to send me some of his daily thinking notes that he sent me these two paragraphs. After a night, he sent another message, saying that some of his words were too impulsive. I think he probably just wanted to paint his own paintings, never wanting to accuse or criticize anything from a superior position.

Guo Longyao knows that there is something solid in painting, so he is mute but not timid, and does not follow the crowd. He uses this solidity to fight against the trend. But where is the “solidity”? He went on to say, “It is a certain kind of superiority in the humanistic world that can be perceived behind the paintings”.

I think he may be talking about some kind of universality and eternity that transcends time and space behind the form of painting, such as warmth, love, beauty, contemplation and freedom. He pursues the solidity of painting, painting in a down-to-earth, definitive way, letting everything reveal itself. “Structures, thoughts, time and space become ghostly and ancient, condensed, can be before or after, and this is the greatest freedom for me.”

The interview ended here, and when we parted, I asked Guo Longyao what his future plans were, and he said only briefly:

“To be happy and just go on like this.”