PREFACE
Guan Weiwei returns to his night, It is no longer a patchwork of ink stains in front of a narrow window in the city, night of screen with flashing symbols. It is the years of quietly tracing with pencil when first learned lithography. Even the folds of the mountains in my rural childhood are far away、A vast night filled with bells and cries. It is still an inner dialogue between a small space and oneself, but the colors and expressions of the birds, plants, and fruits have faded, like words, emerging in the pure black with a photosensitive white rendering, gradually turning into a heavy void within the rounded and closed edges.
Site constraints once activated his exploration of ink and paper.The rigid urban life and the uneasy emergency of three years allowed him to obtain a sense of affirmation of life by depicting plants that can be seen everywhere in black and white tones. He incorporated colorful personal image experiences to synthesize a quiet but absurd appearance. When the status changes,the expression of ink and image is no longer relaxed, he chooses subtraction and returns to the basic practice of using pencil to draw white on a black background. Starting from the frosted fruits with different colors, the colors, symbols, scenes, and projections are gradually stripped away, leaving only single or paired cold-faced objects looming in the darkness.
Guan Weiwei just reversed the painting process of‘filling in black and leaving white’ to ‘filling in white and leaving black’. It did not form an inverse negative film, but create a strange image like a night vision imaging, through the delicately polished gradient texture and edge processing, blurred and deep. Just like in his childhood, the birds that stayed on the apricot trees in the courtyard, hidden in the darkness, only their frightening twinkling eyes. Grandma going to hold the lighted sunflower pole and swing it, so (he) will no longer be afraid and can run to school.
The perspective reconstructs the interpretation of objects, sometimes it is the compassionate back in <Night>, sometimes mask-like folds. On the conceptualized childish form, the particles flow into satin, and high-gloss white lines floating around suggest dislocation. The silver foil material that once appeared as an industrial wonder has turned into a rusty glimpse in the darkness, just like the highlights that have been lost by time. Overly simple illusion work often leads to materialized mystery.
Guan Weiwei temporarily put aside the spatial construction method of stacking numerous pictures and graphics to create unexpected plots, and used the light and dark transformation between the white form and the black background within the simplest layer relationship, allowing the confused viewer to inadvertently discover that the space has been transformed, the reversal and circulation of the outer and inner levels quietly occurred, becoming a Kleinsche Flasche that pierced the night. Don’t forget, he called the dark part of this faintly emerging silver outline, sunk in the underside of the flower and inverted in the background, a ‘black hole’.
