Disclosure

The exhibition brings together thirteen paintings in colour on raw silk, incorporating layers of film transparencies and tracing paper. When a viewer triggers an infrared sensor, light strips behind the painted surface switch on, exposing previously concealed images as the light and conditions of viewing change. The resulting lightbox paintings are contingent on these conditions, taking on the qualities of toys for make-believe. At the same time, the painted surfaces beneath their acrylic coverings create an effect of one-way visibility, placing viewing in an unequal relationship: viewers glimpse the painted figures’ secrets, yet those figures can scarcely perceive the gaze from beyond the picture. Extending the concerns that have long occupied Guo’s practice, the works systematically survey a repertoire of shared emotional symbols marked by place and time and seek, with heartfelt attention, to exhaust it; from these glimpses into secret love affairs emerge the intimate murmurs of girlhood, in which ardour and disappointment move hand in hand.

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In Guo Fazhan’s practice, materials and techniques are tools for modulating effects, expressly in the service of painting, much as one might ride in a driverless car simply to savour the everyday scenes along the street. Having received systematic training in Chinese painting, Guo has developed, through years of working with raw silk, a sure command of colour application and the nuances of light transmission—from stretching the silk by hand and repeatedly applying glue and alum to mixing colours and dyeing. By adding saturated polyester media and light strips, she has arrived at ‘raw silk neon’, the distinctive creative vocabulary of this phase of her practice.

Disclosure further articulates the asymmetrical ethics of viewing in ‘raw silk neon’. This effect arises from the light transmitted through transparent materials, reflections on their surfaces, and differences in ambient brightness on either side, subjecting the paintings beneath their acrylic coverings to one-way visibility. At night, for example, someone facing a window inside a brightly lit home will tend to see their own reflection, while a person in the street below can clearly observe them and the interior with the naked eye. In Guo’s lightbox painting series, each time the sensor-activated light comes on, it offers an occasion for secrets that cannot be told to be disclosed to one side alone. The painted figures remain absorbed in their own affairs, like islands of needless worry; the crowds of viewers, meanwhile, come and go freely, like a tide into which one cannot step twice. The title of Guo Fazhan’s solo project, Zouguang—translated here as Disclosure—thus holds several meanings. In everyday Chinese usage, it speaks to the theatre of ambiguous intimacy unfolding across Guo’s series: an inadvertent revelation of an intimate part of the body, and the onlooker’s apparently idle yet irrepressible urge to peep. It also invokes a physical phenomenon, suggesting that light’s coming and going acts like an invisible hand, brushing aside the appearance of harmony before drawing a loose veil over an awkward truth; what we see disappears or comes into view entirely according to its intensity.

The commercial settings and consumer objects in the exhibited works serve, in particular, as clues to place, period and private feeling. From a distinctive cold drinks shop on a street in northeastern China (The Cold Food Palace), a women’s beauty salon (Two for the Road) and a Chinese restaurant in Chinatown (Chinatown) to a room for psychological or relationship counselling (Night Clinic), these places of service after dark harbour people’s longings for encounters, companionship, care and consolation. The everyday goods and forms of emotional consumption scattered among them give these expectations a recognisable public form: Polyester Memory evokes the clothing fashions of the 1980s; in Unattainable Illusions, a dressing mirror adorned with a decorative landscape painting reflects the conflation of individual narratives and social ideals; and the cooking-themed toy set Good Wife packages a rehearsal for ‘becoming the perfect housewife’ as a model of the good life, available for purchase and play, while the figures’ coyness and infidelity quietly undermine the ‘I love you’ inside the microwave. Commercial spaces open for business provide a stage on which feelings unfold, while sought-after goods already sold also take an active part in choreographing desires and roles. Guo’s pictorial language thus resonates with Eva Illouz’s concept of emotional capitalism: as economic activity and emotional life shape one another, individual hopes and disappointments accumulate, tracing a shared silhouette of the market, the times, identity and a culture of emotional self-help.

Through one-way visibility, Guo creates ‘safe houses’ that are at once full of tenderness and easily shattered, using sweet, harmless surfaces to harbour the cruelty of truth. With a sure command of silent drama, Guo’s gentle yet fearless brushwork and paintings as thin as a cicada’s wing show a backyard quietly catching fire, while their sweet, endearing inhabitants proudly don sumptuous robes crawling with lice and fleas—unafraid of disclosure.

Text by Yuyang Lin