J.C. Kuo (郭振昌), in his new solo exhibition Happenstance (偶然與巧合), reinforces his standing as one of the best painters in Taiwan. He started to become known in the postmodernism of the 1990s as a rich colorist and a pioneer in bridging styles and genres. He combined abstraction and representation, traditional Chinese imagery and western icons, East and West ? and he did it without being trite. In some ways he is like a Taiwanese Jean-Michel Basquiat. Just like Basquiat used no filters as he ingested the pop emblems and symbols of the American media before immediately regurgitating them onto canvasses in brilliant technicolor, Kuo also gives order to a raging psyche inundated by a chaotic world of symbols. But his symbols come from his own context: Peking opera masks, western eroticism, auspicious fish, floral prints, the brush strokes of western expressionism and the lines of Chinese woodcut. The woodcut-inspired graphic sense is reminiscent of the work of Roy Lichtenstein. In 1994 he made the journal Art in America's top 200 artists.
Taiwan's contemporary art in the 1990s was exceptionally political, and Kuo's work has never denied politics. But it has also not succumbed to or bounded itself by political rhetoric, usually opting for some subtler route. One painting in the current exhibition, Beijing, Taipei, Shanghai represents these cities with three smiling infants. The Beijing child holds a kirin, a symbol of imperial power, the Taipei child carries a fish, meaning money, and the Shanghai babe flies a kite, for which the connotations are not so obvious. Another painting, Democracy 2, shows a violently singing figure against the backdrop of the word "democracy," which is studded with plastic pearls, baubles and stickers of Superman and Barbie. The style of these new works is still postmodern in Kuo's original vein, but at the same time more mature and rich in detail.
J.C. Kuo's Happenstance is on display at the Main Trend Gallery (大趨勢), located in Taipei at 209-1, Sec. 3, Chengteh Rd. (北市承德路三段209之1號)
RSS