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Shi Guowei has always used photography as a creative tool, but he consciously attenuates the properties of this unique medium. Over the past several years, he has been trying to break the boundaries between photography and painting. Last December 2021, he kindly answered our questions.
Interview: Shi Guowei
Translation: Shuting Zhao
赵姝婷
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.
Shi has always used photography as a creative tool, but he consciously attenuates the properties of this unique medium. Over the past several years, he has been trying to break the boundaries between photography and painting. Last December 2021, he kindly answered our questions.
Do you remember your initial experience at making photography?
I remember it was during an extra-curricular activity class when I was in middle school that I took my father's Seagull DF camera for the first time to take pictures. Then I got into deeper contact when I was in high school, and at that time, I developed the film and went into the darkroom to enlarge the photos by myself.. That experience has influenced my subsequent story, and I was fascinated by it.
Could you tell us about your creative process?
This can be divided into two parts. Technically, it is the hand colouring of black and white photography that has evolved into what is now known as 'photographic painting'. The difference is that the former tries to restore the colours of the subject in my mind and leaves no brushstrokes, while the latter is more subjective in its use of brushstrokes or colours to cover the subject, the end result perhaps being more like a painting on a black and white base.
In terms of content, what started out as a socially charged subject borrowed from art historical classics and tampered with to express one's own perceptions of current social issues, gradually evolved into a subjective depiction of ordinary scenes and scenes, expressing deeper thoughts.
You use a large-format camera to take black and white photographs and then add watercolours to create 'photographic painting'. When and why did you start using this hand colouring technique?
I started experimenting with this technique when I was at university, but I only started using it formally for my final project in Germany.
There are two reasons. First, colour photography is boring for me and the colours are too rigid and mechanical, without warmth. Second, it is more challenging and vivid to reorganise the colour system of a scene through my own memory, as if one were to create an image of a moment recorded by dabbing one's brush with what one thinks is the right colour, which in itself is very attractive. It is a challenge to time and space.
Many forms of traditional Chinese art seem to be reflected in your work. Is it important for you?
In my work I don't actually consciously emphasise traditional Chinese art forms, Probably because I am Chinese, such forms are perhaps written in the subconscious. Without noticing it, it is portrayed. However, I personally do not want to be confined to traditional Chinese art forms, I want to pursue an essential aesthetic that is common and free from geographical limitations.
From 2015 onwards, nature has become the dominant subject matter in your work. If you were a landscape, what would you be like?
If you consider me as a landscape, I think it could be any ordinary, unassuming corner of it that no one ever looks at, but has its own unique place that is easily overlooked.
What is the difference for you between publishing a book and organizing an exhibition? Which one do you prefer?
Publishing a book is too complicated for me and not my strong point. There are always a lot of problems that are not easy to handle. Especially the size, there is no way to present it better. Besides, there is also a limitation to the expression of the details of the original work. On the contrary, the exhibition of the original work on site is more attractive to me, because the relationship between the space and the original work can be shown in the most intuitive form, and you can really feel the impact of the original work on you, such as the size, which is so large that it has a unique quality that you can't feel in a book.
What are your expectations for the future?
I’ve always been intensely curious about the unknown future. Let’s just go with the flow.
More information:
magician.space/artist/shi-guo-wei
