Guo Xi: The Reenactor

Shanghai Vanguard Gallery presents “The Reenactor“, the first solo show by Guo Xi. In this exhibition, Guo Xi started to be interested by the repetitiveness of the everyday objects and the relationships of modern humans’ physicality to the present time. In the artist’s perspective, the everyday objects in the evolving linearity of time, once produced the state of relentlessness (as if the roller of washing machine), the so-called everydayness would then be subverted (spin). Meanwhile, this subversion would strengthen its intrinsic gulfs and alienation. At this moment, the two-way dialectics of the everydayness and trans-everydayness made the artist realize the nonstop repetition of life is no more than a transcendence from the everyday life into a mental state.

Guo Xi has been exploring and extending on diverse levels about the relations between fiction and nonfiction in his previous works. In the artist’s perspective, the act of inserting an everyday public space into a gallery space by artistic techniques itself is a kind of reversion and substitution. In such a substituted space, the observer no longer needs to enter via the artworks into the artist’s perspective. Conversely, the presence would make the viewers not stickle about how the works play out, in this floating illusion, it’s more about halts and imaginations.

Perhaps on those shelves where goods are continually accumulating, just like we ourselves are adding memories mixing fiction and reality into the everyday life in which the sense of time is subtracted, Guo Xi captured the point through his acute observations, and deftly shifted the cruel side of the realness of the everyday life through a kind of humor, but what actually happened? Will those blurry, doubtful points just end up being the trap set by such fictitious scene?

About Artist:

Guo Xi has shown great potential power through his multi-disciplinary practice in contemporary art even at an early stage of his artistic career. His works have been shown in many museum, Such as :Tell Me a Story (Group Show, Rockbund Art Museum, Shanghai); Hack Space(Group Show, K11 Art Foundation, Hong Kong); We Chat: A Dialogue in Contemporary Chinese Art( Group show, Wesleyan University, USA); Memorandum for Gaia ( Group show, PSA, Shanghai). He has also participated in group show hold by Franken Dael Foundation and Rijksakademis OPEN during his residency in Rijksakademis Van beeldende kunsten, Amsterdam. His works have been collected by Red Brick Museum and other important private collectors.