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Leilei Guo
~ China |
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| Leilei Guo: Modern technology affects the visual world constantly – mass advertisements, art reproductions, public and private pictures, and commercial artwork. It seems as if we have never experienced a period like now, surrounded by so many reproductions and false techniques. People begin to lose the ability to recognize what is natural and what is artificial. As an artist, I hope I can through my work protect the only unvarnished field left in my heart, and describe a true world to the universe. |
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Kun Peng
By Leilei Guo
Beijing, China: Leilei Guo, 2010. One-of-a-Kind.
22 x 8"; 8 pages. Color laser prints of original photographs by Guo. Wing shaped boards and pages. Boards covered in feathers.
Leilei Guo: "In this work, I got the idea from a book called A Happy Excursion by Zhuang Zi (in English he is called Master Chuang/Chuang Tzu, an ancient Chinese philosopher): 'In the northern ocean there is a fish, called the Kun, no one knows how many thousand miles is it in size. This Kun changes into a bird, called the Peng. Its back is nobody knows how many thousand miles in breadth. When angry, it flies and its wings obscure the sky like clouds. When this bird prepares to start to the Southern Ocean, the Celestial Lake, we read in the Records of Marvels that the water is smitten for a space of three thousand miles around, while the bird itself mounts upon a great wind to a height of ninety thousand miles for a flight of six months' duration. The Peng bird saw the moving white mists of spring, the dust-clouds, and the living things blowing their breaths among them. It wondered whether the blue of the sky was its real color, or only the result of distance without end, and saw that the things on earth appeared the same to it.'
"For this book I took photographs of the Forbidden City (the center of Beijing). The pictures show the winter sky as it customarily is, engulfed in a heavy haze. On the cover of the book, I pasted the black feathers, just like the Peng bird described in A Happy Excursion. My idea is that with the development of the economy and industry, pollution is increasing fast. It seems as if the long and frequently hazy weather is a response from nature to our over-exploitation on the earth. Like the Kun Peng, we have distanced ourselves from reality. The strange changeable weather, meaningless war and bloodletting, and general weird happenings have us thinking about our environment, wondering whether the sky is blue or if perhaps the chaos of haze is the new reality."
$1,200 |
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Scripture, without Any Words, but Verily
By Leilei Guo
Beijing, China: Leilei Guo, 2009. One-of-a-Kind.
7 x 13 x 5.75" closed; 19 leaves. Materials: Plexiglas and white nylon threads sewn with a chain stitch.
Leilei Guo: "The pages are made of transparent Plexiglas. The white nylon threads run through the hole in the pages in an interwoven way. When it is open, the book presents a visual effect – books within a book, without words. [It is meant to suggest] the magic essence of Chinese Confucianism, Buddhism and Taoism of being or not being."
$1,800
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The Way
By Leilei Guo
Beijing, China: Leilei Guo, 2008. One-of-a-kind.
13.625 x 12.75"; 88 pages. Woodcut and silkscreen on rice paper. Concertina structure. Bound in cloth, front board in white, back board in black.
This book embodies the artist's vision of two strands of Chinese philosophy — Tao, or The Way, and Yin Yang. Bound in one white board and one black board, a clear allusion to Yin Yang synchronicity, this concertina reenacts the central rhythm of life. A red form printed from a woodcut (a similar form is used to practice Chinese calligraphy) repeats on each page. The Chinese character for Tao, printed in back by silkscreen, repeats in the center of the red form on each page, except that the character disintegrates as the book progresses. This is the natural order: we come from nothing, grow in complexity, and return to nothing. This cycle repeats continually at all levels of life. The simple elegance of this book suggests the consolation inherent in yielding to the process, the Way.
$800 |
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| Leilei Guo Out of Print Title: |
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East West (II)
By Leilei Guo
Beijing, China: Leilei Guo, 2010. Edition of 4.
20.75 x 13.25 x 1"; 24 pages. Silkscreen prints. Paste paper. Photographs. Flexible binding to allow circular display. Housed in wraparound horizontal case with open ends.
Leilei Guo: "In our life, misunderstanding makes collision; selfishness makes gaps; languages bring differences; cultures create distance. When East meets West, all that we need is to try to understand each other, look at the positives of each culture, and perhaps make self-reflection with a moderate temper. Even if the cultures seem different, if we just look at culture as a thing, we might prevent many unnecessary conflicts.
"For this work, I got the inspiration from a stroll along an antique market in Beijing, named Pan Jia Yuan, a large and very famous antique market and a major tourist attraction. Most visitors come with the dream of finding real antiques. There is a very big space for showing different kinds of sculptures: Kwan-yin, stone statues of Buddha carved from Han dynasty, sculptures of Venus, and many western sculptures, all being sold in the same place. When I walk through those different sculptures, I think that we look
at those statue as the embodiment of sanctity and gods, but in this space (and often in common life) they just examples of sculptural arts. This is part of the ambiguous boundaries between art and life.
"In this work, I first combined silkscreen prints (all of which used
handmade paste paper) and hand drawing. After each page of
prints-and-drawing is a page of photographs from the antique sculpture market. On the prints-and-drawing page I have handcut holes to reveal some part of the sculpture photographs on the next page. In this way you can see some part of the photographs through the prints and the combination of photos-real life and art makes the point that they are in a very real way the same thing. Interestingly, in Chinese, the pronunciation of East West is the same as the pronunciation of thing -Dong Xi."
(SOLD) |
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Nest - SoHo
By Leilei Guo
Beijing, China: Leilei Guo, 2009. Edition of 3.
4.75 x 10.75 x 1.25"; 42 leaves. Silkscreen print cutouts. Metal screw post binding. Tie closure.
Leilei Guo: "Today the boundaries between people are becoming blurred and even indistinct. People from different countries are living in close proximity and becoming more and more like each other. We can see Westerners in Asia and people from the East in Western countries. Sometimes it's difficult to tell where we are: New York? Tokyo? Beijing? Paris? Globally culture is becoming more homogenized, and the boundaries that made us distinct are disappearing. This is reflected in the architecture, especially in our large cities. Even as the size of our buildings grows, our living spaces are becoming smaller and smaller. This is the perfect metaphor for what's happening: our world gets bigger but our individual differences are fading.
"Soho is a central business district in Beijing, a very busy area, of high white building, cold and commercial. While I am standing in front of these buildings, I can not recognize where I am, just do not believe I am in Beijing, a thousands years old city. It seems as if all the business buildings in the world are so similar."
Nest reflects these thoughts. When the pages are fanned out around the metal post, the box-like structures form a flattened cyclone of conformity. Above the eddy of simulated action is a blue sky of uniformity created by the reverse side of the building screenprints.
(SOLD) |
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Windows
By Leilei Guo
Beijing, China: Leilei Guo, 2009. One-of-a-kind.
5.5 x 7.5 x 10.5" closed; 7.5 x 103" extended; 19 folds. Concertina binding. Bamboo wrap carrier wrapper with ribbon ties.
Leilei Guo: "In this book, I got the inspiration from the traditional Chinese park windows. The Summer Palace is a park [that] was an imperial garden thousands of years ago. It is famous for its wall windows, which decorate the white walls in many different shapes. Inside the windows are transparent pictures portraying traditional Chinese culture. People could see simultaneously these pictures as well as the scene behind the wall, a view that combined Chinese culture and imperial garden art.
"I have wrapped my book in wood hangings, like an ancient curtain covering the windows. Inside, I have cut books in the shapes of these Summer Palace windows. Inside the windows I put my overexposed photos of Beijing’s streets at night. My point is that Beijing has a very long history but has changed over time. Today when people look through the windows they not only see the beautiful scene, but also see how the modern world has affected this old city. My book represents my feelings for the city where I was born, grew up, and live – a place of ancient stories but with a very modern heart."
(SOLD) |
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Fairyland
By Leilei Guo
Beijing, China: Leilei Guo, 2008. Edition of 3.
17 x 12 x 2.75" closed, 12 x 10 x 39.3" extended; 20 pages. Double-sided tunnel book. Silkscreen prints.
Leilei Guo: "My idea of this work comes from my grandfather's home, which is a very old style building in Beijing. There is a huge space in the center of the building, all the apartments are around this space, so when you are on the first floor (ground) you could see the sky through this space, and if you are on the top of the building, you look down and can see what happens on the ground.
“In the last century, here are lots of these kinds of buildings in Beijing. Nowadays, many apartment buildings will not have this space, because they want more people living in one building which will be good for their business.
“Every time I look into this space, always thinking people living in many different rooms, some even their whole life, like living in many tiny boxes in this world. People buying an apartment like buying a small space in the air. It seems like people living in space beyond the ground and heaven. Is that tiny box our own home in the heart."
(SOLD) |
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Page last update: 05.16.12
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