Guo Jian, Chinese-Australian painter, sculptor, and photographer
Guo Jian (Chinese: 郭健; pinyin: Guō Jiàn; born in Guizhou China in 1962) is a Chinese Australian artist. His work has been exhibited and collected in Germany, France, Belgium, Sweden, US, Mexico, Australia, New Zealand, Hong Kong and China, including Musée de Picardie in France, Brussels Art Festival, the Art Gallery Of New South Wales, the Queensland Gallery of Modern Art (GoMA) and the National Gallery of Australia (NGA).He has been featured in The New York Times, CNN, The Sydney Morning Herald, the Australian Broadcasting Commission (ABC), Artist Profile magazine and on the cover of The Wall Street Journal Asia Weekend Magazine.He is part of a movement of contemporary Chinese artists whose work is characterised as Cynical Realism, which began in the 1990s in Beijing. Born a year after the Great Leap Forward, his art is heavily influenced by the last fifty years of political upheaval and violence in China, a period that included the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution in the 1960s and 70s, the Sino Vietnamese war in the early 1980s, and the Tiananmen Square massacre in 1989.At age seventeen, he enlisted in China’s People’s Liberation Army (PLA) during a recruitment drive to support the Sino-Vietnamese war, initiated by the country’s then leader Deng Xiaoping.
A central theme to Guo Jian’s art derives from his observations of the application of propaganda and the arts to both motivate soldiers and sway public opinion. His perspective comes from his experiences as a propaganda poster painter in the PLA and propaganda officer in a transport company, then later from the outside looking back in as a student demonstrator during the Tiananmen Square protests in the spring of 1989.His art also explores common themes and approaches in both Chinese propaganda and Western propaganda.