GUO Haiqiang 郭海强

GUO Haiqiang (b. 1980) graduated from the Sculpture Department of Xi’an Academy of Fine Arts and now lives in Xi’an. GUO is currently working primarily with painting and his artistic practice inhabits the boundary between sculpture and painting, intending to bring shape to his spiritual world. In recent years, GUO has mainly been working in “sketching.” Although this practice of working “en plein air” is all but rare in art history, and has long since been elevated to a methodological model of artistic creation by Cézanne and others, GUO’s approach is much more than a simple nostalgic repetition of 19th-century practices by one inhabiting the 21st. With a shift of cultural context and artistic concept, the artist’s sketches reveal an attempt to infer the truth of things and seek out the underlying laws of everything — a concept termed “Ge Wu” in Chinese epistemology. To the extent it is possible, GUO rejects contemporary techniques and internalises what he observes with his eye. Then, he translates what he sees of the material world into a simple, yet peaceful inner world through artistic creation.

GUO Haiqiang’s solo exhibitions include "Woodcutting"(Saisen Art, Shanghai, 2023), "Emerging from the Mountains" (Don Gallery, Shanghai, 2021), "Fengyukou, Qin Mountains" (Boers-Li Gallery, Beijing, 2017), "Tempo, Space & Gravity" (Boers-Li Gallery, Beijing, 2015), etc. GUO’s work has been presented at OCAT Xi’an (Xi’an, 2018), Shaanxi Province Museum (Xi’an, 2017), Art Museum of Nanjing University of the Arts (Nanjing, 2014), etc.