"Over the past several years, I have been trying to break the boundaries between photography and painting; to tear down the dated, stale wall in-between them. In a more precise way, I’m straddling the borderline between them, trying to keep my balance as if I were a tightrope walker on a wire, leaning neither to one side nor to the other side; neither towards photography, nor towards painting.” Shi Guowei
Shi Guowei has always used photography as a creative tool, but he consciously attenuates the properties of this unique medium. The majority of his photographed subjects are ordinary items, and they embody a vague collective consciousness. So Shi removes the color from the photographs to find a monotonous black-and-white base. He then reapplies the color using washes to create a final color photograph. This process shows his mistrust of the objective world, but it also challenges the objectivity of photography. He does not believe that photography is a way of reconciling our observations of the world, but the naked eye perceives color much better than the camera lens does. Based on his recollections of the photographed scene, Shi chooses colors that he thinks are suitable, which make the resulting color photographs very lively and accurate. Because we bring our own emotions to the things we see, the only true colors are those that carry these emotions, and these colors can only be obtained through human intervention.
Shi Guowei 史国威 (1977, Luoyang, Henan) currently lives and works in Beijing. He graduated with a bachelor’s degree in photography from the Department of Visual Communication at the Tsinghua University Academy of Arts & Design (the former Central Academy of Art and Design) in 2002, and he received his master’s degree in photography from the Fachhochschule Dortmund in 2006.
