Guo Longyao: The Flower｜Exhibition Review

Artist Guo Longyao’s solo exhibition “The Flower” at MG Space in Beijing features eight of his oil paintings. On the canvas, apricot trees grow in the wilderness, on the highlands, or in the middle of the road, with white or pink flowers blooming in full bloom and waving in the wind. In addition to the artist’s own experience of life, these works also present a “weak thought” that is different from strong subjectivism.

Contemporary Italian philosopher Gianni Vattimo once said, “Ambiguity has always been the hallmark of plant life.” Beginning with Aristotle more than 2,000 years ago and continuing to the present day, Western thought has paid great attention to animals with souls, while plants have been left in a lonely and soulless state. In contrast, plants have been left in a state of loneliness and lack of soul, and have received little attention. This exclusion of plant life has led to a tone of Western art that often emphasizes a strong subjective perspective, which has continued into Impressionist painting. However, Guo Longyao’s paintings clearly abandon subject-based artistic expression, following more along the path of Cézanne and reaching what Maurice Merleau-Ponty considered to be the ambiguous realm in art where the object and the self are forgotten.

Guo Longyao grew up in Gansu. According to his own account, the dry climate in the northwest makes it impossible to grow any flowers or plants. The apricot blossoms bloom year after year in the spring, becoming a special scenery in the northwest. In the oil painting series “Apricot Blossom Cloud”, a little bit of apricot blossom is like a cloud in the sky, light and fluffy, like a restrained but tenacious vitality lingering between the trunks of the trees. The significance of the apricot blossoms in the painting is not simply a reproduction of the artist’s conception, but reveals more about the thinking of the apricot blossoms themselves, as well as the characteristics of life nurtured by the Northwest landscape. What comes into the viewer’s eyes is not a single apricot blossom, but a life journey of generation and change. Guo Longyao’s wrinkled brushstrokes express the subtle movement of the apricot blossoms swaying in the long wind, and at the same time evoke thoughts of their pliable vitality. The blossoming of the apricot blossom is not only symbolized by the crumpled dots, but also demonstrates the fusion between the artist’s tactile and visual senses, as the kneading and rubbing techniques add tactile texture to the blossom. This is in line with Vattimo’s observation that the vision of plants is a weak idea: no identity, no center, no unity. This “weakness” against subjectivity overcomes the cliché of the object’s subordination to the artist’s conception.

This is why the work suggests a George Bataille-esque economy of consumption that flows through nature: the sun nourishes the apricot tree for nothing in return. The apricot blossoms bloom and shine. And when they wither, they wither to the ground, with no limitations or reservations in the process, as is nature’s way. Related to this is the importance of the environment in the composition. In all the works, although the apricot tree is in a distinctive position, it seldom occupies too large an area of the frame. The bright apricot trees always form a contrasting relationship with the bald and yellow land, and one cannot exist without the other. This echoes the philosophy of life of the “thought of weakness”: plants are immovable, rooted in the earth, and always inseparable from their growing environment. For this reason, plants are always adapting themselves to all the changes in the external world: rain, sun, soil, seasons. This is why all the backgrounds in the paintings are composed of extremely flat structures and color blocks, so that the apricot blossoms appear to be suspended above them. Plant life has always blossomed out of symbiosis, which has given rise to an indifferent, identity-less, subject-less botanical intelligence, very close to the adiaphora pursued by Stoicism in ancient Greece.

Inside the gallery, the video work “Dreams” is shown, which is 48 minutes long. In the film, an apricot tree grows in a yellow field. The tree is in full bloom, white and lush. The artist himself wanders under the tree and lies down in the shade of the apricot tree, resting in silence, and the freedom of “worrying about nothing on his side and lying down under his bed” at the end of Zhuangzi’s “Journey to the Promised Land” is given an embodied presentation by the artist. In the background, there is a burst of flower songs, one by one, traditional ballads of Northwest China, which are beautiful and high. A leisurely and quiet business pervades the image, as if the cracked and dried up yellow sandy earth nearby has also shared the oozing greenness of the apricot trees. The work echoes a kind of infinite relaxation of “the idea of weakness”, a weakening of the boundaries of the self, matching the powerlessness of the plant itself, and it is precisely this powerlessness and weakness that supports the flowers to be generated forever, and to change forever, just as Lao Tzu said, “Life is also soft and weak. “. Perhaps one could say that Guo Longyao’s art is not only about flowers. On the contrary, what he is obsessed with is how to move towards the flowers.