In college, Guo Shuling was a rebellious person. After graduating from the Affiliated High School of Guangdong Academy of Fine Arts, she gave up the guaranteed quota of Guangmei and resolutely went to Beijing to be admitted to the oil painting department of the Central Academy of Fine Arts with her own strength. After graduation, she also chose to "drift north" and experienced several years of northern life. In 2019, Guo Shuling went to New York as an artist.
"If I wanted something, I wouldn't make a second choice, there was no way back."
To some extent, there is no way back from being an artist.
Living in New York made her decide to live and create in a different environment, and at the same time, say goodbye to her past life. "To be far away from the past life is to say goodbye to everything in the past, to all the relationships I have established in Beijing, whether it is life or art, to say goodbye to everything in the past." This allowed me to redevelop a new version of myself. And in the current lifestyle, it is also more isolated. So the work is closely related to my life experience. ”
"I am not the kind of artist who constructs a certain philosophical theory, my creation follows my life gradually, and the emotional expression is the main body."
Now, Guo Shuling sticks to the lifestyle of living on sailboats for most of the year.
Guo Shuling remembers her first experience of trying sailing.
"This kind of life is incredible. Beautiful, just looks beautiful. Most of the time, it's challenging. ”
Sailing, most of the time, depends on nature. The course of the journey depends entirely on the weather and wind speed, which is far from the life planned precisely on shore. Contemporary sailboats are fuel-powered only as an aid when docking and offshore, and more than 90% of the journey takes place in the quiet sound of the engines turned off. The driver needs to pay attention to the changing wind and maneuver the rudder and sail to match.
In 2020, Guo Shuling and her husband set off from Martinique in the Caribbean, passing through the Caribbean and the Bahamas, to the north of the United States, the distance is somewhat similar to that of Hainan to Beijing, the purpose of this trip is to change to a new sailing ship.
"It was my first long sailing trip, going from country to country, facing the waves off the sea, bumpy and even a little seasick. At that time, I even felt that I might break up with him as a sailing enthusiast. ”
But after a period of adaptation, the landscape on the sea and the geographical changes between countries undoubtedly moved Guo Shuling, and she began to appreciate the beauty of navigation.
One day, as they were about to enter the port of the U.S. Virgin Islands, a large group of black and white dolphins surrounded and clustered, as if leading her into the port. Sometimes on overnight voyages, a lot of flying fish fly into the net at the bow of the boat. "The next day, I boiled them for nothing, and they were quite delicious."
The cabin of the sailing ship, one of the corners of the world, is her studio. In her work, most of the small and medium-scale paintings are done on boats. Some of the large-scale works were completed in her studio in Philadelphia when she returned to the city.
It is not easy to abandon the past experience of painting, it is a certain confrontation between mental and physical inertia.
A few years after leaving campus, many of Guo Shuling's creations are still linked to realism, and her paintings at that time would also depict nature, trees and flowers, mixed with the flow of light, laying the groundwork for her viewing of the ocean and nature on a sailing ship.
In the process of going to MOMA over and over again, Guo Shuling found some artists she had paid little attention to before, facing her works with her body, such as Mark Rothko who fills the canvas with huge blocks of color, Helen Frankenthaler who sketches fluid poetic forms, Agnes Martin who has lived in the desert for a long time, and Hilma af Klint who is fully immersed in the occult. This viewing provides a certain empathy for her turn, and she begins to enter into a kind of inward exploration, and the exploration of self.
This emotional resonance of creation completes a certain intersection with Guo Shuling's visual experience in her sailing life. On the eastern coast of the United States, the emptiness facing the sea, the change of color and the sense of flow of evening colors, immersed in her creations. "I aspire to break the inertia and have the courage to face a life that changes, rather than staying in one place every day and entering the cycle of work." I want to break myself, my past achievements, and all the traps I have set for myself. ”
Guo Shuling began to create in the cabin, from the body to the consciousness, into a certain flow of freedom. Of course, there are many difficulties in the creation of the cabin, and Guo Shuling needs to adjust the state of creation to adapt to this kind of life, such as painting only at a certain time during the day, facing the control of the scale, and viewing distance, but in the limitation, you can also find infinity.
In 2020, Guo Shuling's first solo exhibition in New York, "5-6 pm", recorded colors taken from time points, and the soft gradient colors in the evening formed a huge contrast with the fierce and contrasting colors of the past.
Solo exhibition "5-6pm" scene
If "5-6 pm" is about time, the latest exhibition "Whisper" is about space. In the new exhibition, Guo Shuling completes the creation of her paintings by silent reading and marking them with coordinate systems, and the small islands scattered like pearls are no longer just passers-by in her sailing life, but enter her paintings in a more timeless way. The names of the entire series include coastal cities in the eastern United States and several island nations in the Caribbean, and it is possible to piece together on the world map the approximate footprints of Guo Shuling's voyages in the past two years. The series title, Sotto Voce, vividly expresses the realm and atmosphere of the real and illusionary scenes she depicts. The word comes from Italian and is meant to convey the point in a way that deliberately lowers the tone. It is also a musical term for instrumental performance, indicating a dramatic reduction in volume in performance, more singing and whispering than pianissimo in the usual sense, and examples of use can be found in the scores of Mozart's Requiem and Chopin's Nocturne.
Live at the solo exhibition "Sotto VOCE"
"The life of navigation leaves man completely naked in nature: the sound of the wind, the movement of clouds, the undulations of waves, the dryness of the air, the chirping of birds and insects, the pulsation of fish and beasts, these things reshape the character of man. The relationship with nature is no longer dual, enter it completely, live with it, regardless of you and me. The ego is like a sotto voce in the nurturing of nature, slowly lowering until it disappears, which is the most comfortable relationship between man and nature. ”
The silence in the ocean is different from the so-called momentary silence in the city, and at some moment, this silence leads to a more inspired and keen perception. When surrounded by that silence, the whole person wakes up. "Looking back, the paintings in the past seem a bit complicated, and I think it is related to the temperament of the city I lived in at that time. When facing the sky and sea level, there are no cutting lines, only the horizon, and the rest of the lines on the sea are soft. In cities, many lines are straight, and a whole piece of sky is cut into various shapes, making it difficult to see the whole picture. ”
She began to abandon pictures as a physical auxiliary form of memory, relying on image memory and manuscripts, "Photos are rough interception of a moment, but memories have the coherence of feelings, when an idea is to be realized on the picture, in the process of layering the color, the brain will experience the image again and again." Now I begin to understand that when you draw something, you see it, you have to forget it and then paint it again. Do not directly draw what the eye sees, but go through the process of fermentation of the image staying in perception. The reality of the feeling is more vivid and reliable than the reality of the sight. "At the same time, the entire practice of painting is focused, relying on reality on the level of perception and consciousness to achieve precise expression.
"There is a Barnes Art Museum in Philadelphia, where I live, and there are so many Cézanne's works that I often stand in front of his 'St. Victor's Hills' and think about his phrase 'the landscape thinks within me, I am its consciousness, and only deep concentration can restrain the erratic eyes.'"
In the life of sailing, most of the time is spent at the port of mooring. "Sometimes, I also have to fight boredom and I also reduce my social interaction. Yoga is done on deck every day. When entering the meditation stage, the horizon seen in navigation is actually very close to the absolute silence of meditation, a parallel state of left and right symmetry, and such compositions often appear in the paintings of these two years. "This is also the visual image in my brain." ”
This quietness, also like a tide, completes the diffusion from life to works, the sea and sky, with a certain reclusive complex and spiritual yearning.
Now Guo Shuling is a new mother who has been "in office" for just three months. Despite some surprises and suddenness, she is still adjusting to this switch of identity, the adjustment of the pace of life, and the physical pain and fatigue. "Now I have temporarily lost time to yoga in the sun. At 8 p.m., after the child goes to bed, it will be the stage when I concentrate on my work. ”
Sometimes, she would take her baby back to the cabin to bask in the sun and sketch in the area where she used to work and paint. At the beginning of next year, she plans to take the baby with her husband and start a new voyage, follow the rhythm of nature, and chase life. "Next year, I'm going to a port at the end of Long Island, New York, where my husband's ship used to stop for five years. Then you will pass through New York, you will stop for a while, then go to the destination port for the summer, stay for five months, wait until the weather turns cold, and then continue sailing south. ”
"Now I will gradually close some channels, but this does not mean that I will stop absorbing information, I hope that future creations can follow my life experience, closely bite with nature, grow inward, take root downward, and slowly approach my spiritual core."
There is one thing that Guo Shuling learned during navigation, "Nature has its very powerful side, you can't fight it, don't plan, keep observing." She admits that she has also experienced the process of screwing up, "Letting go of obsession, I hope to move towards a peaceful and restored state of creation, so that my pipe, which connects nature and painting, remains smooth and sensitive." ”
Written and edited by Juvan Zhu
Photo courtesy of Guo Shuling
Design: Xiaoni