Guo Donglai

The Artworks Design of The Residency Programme Plan in OCT Boxes Art Museum

On March 6, 2018, my wife and I arrived at OCT Boxes Art Museum in Shunde, which began our residency program.

In November 2017, I had a short time in Shunde. The mild climate and the pleasing environment are still fresh in my memory. Now visiting Shunde the second time from the freezing North in early spring even more warms up my soul which has been left out in cold for all the winter.

The combinations of space and matter, natural objects and industrial objects have always been my creation method all the time. Therefore, in my view, many tall trees and exotic plants in the park naturally become the "main materials" of my creation this time.

In my opinion, the world that we live in is “unlimited but bounded” space. The world doesn't merely exist within the range that we can experience by our bodies and consciousness. It exists in the ''past'', ''now'' and ''future'' in an infinite and changeable form, goes round and begins again. Each of these three moments has obvious boundaries. They pull and squeeze each other by their own “scopes” in a “parallel” transmission, and the world where we live is formed in the moments when they “pull” and “squeeze”. In this world, every object has its own domain, and there is a complete world in every “self-domain”. I usually consider different natural objects (such as trees, stones, flowers, etc.) as representatives of each individual in the world. In terms of material composition, every kind of natural objects are composed of similar chemical elements, so we can see the objects of the same kind are also similar in appearance. But as objects itself, its relationship with the world, with the ''past'', “now” and future' is unique, and its “self-domain” is also independent. No matter which time points - the "past", "now" or "future" - we stand in, all the feelings that the "self-domain" obtains through experiencing the relationship with the real world are simplex. So I try to create a kind of visual illusion in the creation. These works represent the real world. Under the premise that the “reality” remains static and original, viewers need to constantly change their viewing angles to obtain different visual feelings. All this is trying to express: everything in the world is multifaceted.

At the same time, I believe that only when we detach from the original state of the material and the ready-made and industrial nature can we create new languages and meaning links from the relationship between different things - find the new meaning which generates instantly when we change the state of objects and recombine them. Specifically, I recombine natural materials and industrial materials. It seems like “separation”, but “generation” in fact, so I can completely get out of the representation of pure things, and reveal the communication and interaction between their “original state” and ”artificial state”. Different things encounter and combine with each other so that activate the isolated objects. Blurring the boundary between manual work and nature also shows the existence state of new combination and its concept and meaning .

So, in this programme, I hope to try to combine the mirror stainless steel with trees in the park to create a ''multidimensional space'' in the three-dimensional world that we can experience by our senses, to delineate the boundaries of different latitudes, and to explore the relationship between matter and the world and space with a ''visual rhetoric” device. 

I think that in this way, we allow artworks to enter the public space, let them echo the life, promote the interaction between artworks and the public, guide people’s ways of life with literature and art, and transform the whole park into an endless, wall-less and non-profit public art space. Meanwhile, it is also a positive response to the “Ten-Year Public Art Project” policy of the Shunde government to create an urban cultural forest.

Guo Wenlai