Scenery/State

Guo Kai’s genres of painting can be identified as pastoral landscapes and architecture. He implements animated organic lines and intentional artificiality to create an individualistic and highly distinguishable mode of landscape painting. Under Guo’s brush, the animated lines seem to have an inherent will of their own, spreading sporadically across the canvas, leaving a sense of energy and dynamic movement in the composition. The source of the energy comes from the subject matter itself, that is the natural scenery, embodied in the grass, flowers, and trees, and more the notion alludes to a core value in traditional Chinese landscape painting.

Unveiling the layers of meaning behind Guo Kai’s works, one discovers a sense of timelessness in his less-than-figurative portrayal of pastoral landscapes and architecture, as well as his sentiments on the state of being of these subjects. These carefully articulated images, ridden of all traces of human presence, ultimately reveal Guo Kai’s idealized inner state of mind.