Guo Hongwei, Painting is Collecting—Bird No. 8, Painting is Collecting—Stone No. 11, Painting is Collecting—Plant No. 12

Guo Hongwei elevates the liquid nature of his pigments to the deciding factor of his painterly language. In avoiding brushstrokes, typically a source of anxiety for painters, his method allows him to emphasize the perceptual relationship between object and form. In his series of watercolors based on the notion of “museology,” specimens are used not to evoke an epistemology of categorization, but rather, through comparison with their real-life referents, to exhibit the painter’s gifts of perception.

This artwork was featured in the UCCA exhibition "ON | OFF: China’s Young Artists in Concept and Practice, ” 2013