Curatorial Statement 展览简介

by Ellen Wang 汪逸玮

Derived from the name of a series of work presented, the title Specters from the Future resonates with collective sentiment experienced amid the coronavirus pandemic in 2020: the uncertainty and feebleness of our social and economic conditions in the face of the virus, reminding us of the dangers inherent in our collective anthropocentric perspectives. The works exhibited have been inspired by the underlying conditions and cataclysmic events of the past few years, enabled by conditions fostered by prevailing neoliberal governance systems. Yet, in the hope of a state of symbiosis, Guo’s works provide dynamism to the relationship between humanity and the environmental, social and mental ecologies.

In the paintings of Le Guo, abstraction is not a means to simplify through forms but to intensify. What is presented here is transcendence by means of conveying the symbolic without symbols. Blurs of contours and colours are suspended in the process of coming into shapes but never achieving a definitive state. The boundary between foreground and background is eliminated by the swirls, marks and gestures weaving into each other. The forms and the absence thereof constitute a temporal suspension. The vibrant colours implicate the hues Guo experienced in our digital and product-driven contemporary life. The layering of gestural marks and organic flows of pigments create visions that implicate and juxtapose chance and control, disruption and cohesion through an approach described by the artist as ‘harmonious discord or discordant harmony’.

In Guo’s works, the aesthetics is parallel to experiences, ones that are both bodily and psychological. Determined by the extent of Guo’s body, the sheer scale of the paintings directly addresses the relationship between the viewer and the painting. As mediation of reality and Guo’s own contingencies, the artworks conjure both our transient imagination and collective consciousness veiled beneath screens of memories. This emphasis on the forces or intensities between the viewer and the painting liberates us from the static, mutually-exclusive subject-object binary between the two.

展览的标题“未来之灵”源于其中一系列作品的名称。标题呼应了2020年世界在新冠病毒影响下的集体情绪——社会经济系统在病毒面前显得极为脆弱且充满了不确定性 ——提醒着当下人类中心主义的观点及其无法逃避的弱点。展出的作品的创作灵感来自于艺术家对过去几年中不断浮现的社会环境的现状和其带来的灾难性事件，以及造成这一切的罪魁祸首——现行的新自由主义治理体系的深刻反思。然而，郭洛仍怀抱着对“共生”的希望，而展览中的作品旨在为人类与环境、社会和精神生态之间的关系注入新的活力。

对郭洛来说，抽象的重要性并不在于“形”上的简化，而在于观者与作品两者之间关系的强化。最终呈现的是通过符号（symbols）缺失的符号性（symbolic）方式实现的超然的存在。模糊的轮廓和色彩被悬置在“成形”的过程中，但从未达到一个确定的状态。前景和背景之间的界限被身体姿势般的书写性笔触和图式的相互交织所消弭。形态与形态的缺失间所造成的张力仿佛让时间的流淌暂时停顿。作品中运用的鲜亮颜色源于郭洛在数码科技和商业驱动的当代生活中的经验。层层罗列、充满动态的笔触和在画布上自然流动的颜料被并置在一起，创造了“偶然”和“控制”、“破坏”和“凝聚”的对比与张力。郭洛将此创作模式称为一种“和谐的混杂”或“混杂的和谐”。

在这些作品中，审美与体验是平行的，两者既使观者感同身受，更有精神共鸣。这些作品的大小由郭洛的肢体所能触及到的范围而决定，而作品体量的大小又可以直接影响观者与作品间的关系。作为现实和郭洛个人体验的中介，这些作品既可以引发我们瞬间的想象，也可以唤起隐藏在每个人的记忆屏幕下的集体意识。这些作品通过向观者与作品之间的关系注入活力，将其从静止的主客体二元关系中解放出来。