郭宇恒 SKIRUA 缸中豚脑要爆炸 The Brain in a Vat is Gonna Explode

郭宇恒（SKIRUA） 2003年出生于北京。艺术实践涵盖绘画与雕塑等媒介，作品关注于互联网、社交媒体等引发的文化变迁和冲突，特别是00后人群对生命、人生路径、流行文化等认知，以及面临社会压力的焦虑和迷茫。希望通过绘画行为探索人与人之间，人与社会之间不断变迁的关系。郭宇恒（SKIRUA）是一位千禧年后出生于北京的年轻艺术家，作为其艺术生涯的首次个展，本次展览将展出郭宇恒近两年创作的共9组作品。郭宇恒的艺术实践涵盖绘画与雕塑等媒介，将可爱的动漫式人物作为其视觉语言，关注于被互联网、社交媒体等信息时代产物所生产、影响、消费的年轻一代，对自我、社会和其之间关系机制的认知和想象。 在郭宇恒的绘画作品中，画面的主体人物是对其自身的表现。融合了超扁平、超现实与群像叙事的形式，人物形象没有任何出处，完全来自艺术家的想象，画面中的人物就是她自己，是其创作心理视觉化的表现，呈现出了一种“自画像”式的绘画。自画像以其与艺术家自身的特殊关系而成为一种不可替代的形式存在，郭宇恒在其创作中运用卡通拟态和丰富的叙事来完成自我表达和交流的欲望，像是独白式的宣言，也像是少女的呢喃自话。 郭宇恒的绘画并不是运用一般意义上的传统绘画媒介。她通常用iPad描绘出作品的基调，印刷于布面再用颜料继续深入，造成数码制作感和颜料的流动性混合的观感。受流行文化和亚文化影响，画面中虚拟荒诞、纯真烂漫的社会以及乌托邦、反乌托邦的主题并现，通过与自我的持续对话，表达了年轻一代对他们所参与社会活动间的碰撞与挣扎的思考。  Tang Contemporary Art is proud to announce the opening of the first solo show for young artist SKIRUA on September 12 in the first Beijing space’s second-floor VIP room. SKIRUA belongs to Gen Z, the first generation who were born and grew up as digital natives. The exhibition will present nine works created over the last two years. Her artistic practice encompasses painting and sculpture. Using a visual language of cute, anime figures, she presents to the world the inner selves of her generation--how the internet and social media, products of this information age they inhabit, have molded their views of self and the society, as well as the relationship between the society and the selves. In SKIRUA’s paintings, the main figures are expressions of herself. Fusing Superflat, Surrealism, and collective narrative forms, the figures do not have any external source—they come from the artist’s imagination. The creation by Skirua are portraits of her psychological self, expression of a complex desire to communicate with both herself and the world she lives in. In her work, SKIRUA imitates cartoons and uses rich narratives to convey her desire for self-expression and communication. Her paintings are both manifestos delivered in monologue and a young woman’s whispers to herself. As a digital native, SKIRUA weaves the digital and the traditional medium together effortlessly. She usually starts her work on an iPad and then transfers the framework of her art onto canvas, where she develops the piece in full, adding rich and delicate details. She interprets pop-cultures and sub-cultures that have made an impact on her life with vivid imageries, which leave a unique impression of a world that is both utopian and dystopian, where harmonic chaos is common and innocent absurdity prevails. Through her sustained dialogue with herself, she expresses young people’s thoughts about the collisions and struggles that take place in their social lives. The exhibition begins with a felt-tip pen work entitled I Was Born From the Uterus, and I Will Die By the Uterus. The black-and-white lines delineate an upside-down uterus in the form of a monument, is an expression of the infinity of life and death. The idea for Welcome to the Milk Cow Nail Salon came from an episode in China’s Mega Projects, a documentary series. In order to improve the quality of the milk at the featured production facility, the workers tended to the cows’ hooves, calling them “manicures.” Combining images of milk cows and a nail salon, SKIRUA depicts the exploitation and objectification of the test-based system of education, wherein people feel like spare parts in the social machine. The painting depicts her experiences in public education institutions, considering how the fixed input of personal and mechanized resistance can produce unrestricted outputs. In Not a Guide: How to Become a Contemporary Beauty, a young woman is dismembered and then pieced back together according to the pop definition of “beauty,” a concept shaped by mass beliefs. Here, Skirua voiced her doubts: how do we find a voice of our own in a world crowded to the brink with chatters of technology and symbols of our own making? Beginning in primary school, SKIRUA had romantic feelings about fictional characters in anime, from liking the characters to collecting large numbers of figurines and dolls.  “Tai Tai” reflects a conversation with herself: the black-haired young woman  represents Skirua herself and the green haired one a virtual character but also her alter ego. This piece is about the journey of the young artist is taking to explore her inner self through fantasies, negative comparisons, and love. The young woman’s fantasies are reflected in images with a dose of Freudian narcissism. In I Kissed a Sea Snail Via a LCD, a young woman and sea snail have a fantastical kiss that seems to be separated by a social media screen—they are close yet still apart. A chaotic sense of peeling and dizziness seems to characterize the lines on the snail’s body. People are rapidly receiving information; they are drowning into the endless swirls, as if pulled in by the tide, then transforming into sea snails, unfettered yet very dangerous. Innocent and self-aware, light-hearted yet melancholy, SKIRUA’s works are always sensitive and introspective. In The Sky Today Is Really Too Blue, the seemingly bright blue sky and ever-changing icebergs are backdrop of truncated pieces of young woman, echoing the current uncertainty. That blue sky and the younger generation remind me of Dickens’ opening to The Tale of Two Cities: “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times […] it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity.”   Lu XiangyiAugust 15, 2020