User:Gu Si-Yang

Biography

Gu Si-Yang is a youth contemporary Chinese artist; his interests include areas in Art Education, the Scientific study of Oriental Art History, art materials, East Asia Art Culture, Classical Painting language in Contemporary Art and Aquatint Etching, Monotype Printmaking, Design, Illustration and Fine Art.

Siyang's artworks have both Western and Eastern influences, such as the Western style of Expressionism and the Eastern style of Chinese calligraphy. Siyang has painting various aspects of China, including much of its architecture, plants, animals, people, as well as many of its landscapes and waterscapes in style reminiscent of the expressionist painters of the modern society.

Siyang finished his Bachelor of Fine Art degree at the Griffith University, and he was graduated an Honours degree in the University of New South Wales. He is currently still studying for a postgraduate degree at the University of Melbourne. He loves learning and exploring the philosophical context of contemporary ink painting and oriental art. Therefore, he determined to become an academic researcher on contemporary Chinese art and theory.

Art Philosophical

Faced with a visual art heritage spanning over a thousand years, Chinese artists today face limitless, though culturally specific, creative choices. The work of Gu Si-Yang reflects on this vast history, which, after a century of isolation and social flux, sees the sure and steady emergence and integration of Chinese culture with the global art market.

Gu Si-Yang produces work in ink, oil painting and printmaking. In a performative act which he describes as being akin to the dance of a martial artist, Gu Si-Yang launches into his drawing process, using ink on paper, as if in a meditative state, where, once the brush first touches the paper, he does not stop until the drawing is completed. At times the brush is thoroughly soaked in intense black ink until it is not able to hold another drop; at other times it is barely wet. Drawing is, for him, a process of immediacy and transformation where brush and ink pour onto the paper to form monochrome landscapes of waterfalls and mountains.

Gu Si-Yang's philosophy on art is a confluence of outer world representations of mountains and waterfalls with the dusty atmospheric of an artist's inner vision. He has set for himself the challenge to innovate in the space between traditional Chinese landscape painting and Western modes of abstract figuration.

Si-Yang's ink drawing conveys an immersive intimacy, portraying humanistic themes of man's relation to himself, to nature and to others, as they play out against this great historical backdrop of constancy and change.

Education

2017     Bachelor of Fine Art (Honours), University of New South Wales, Sydney

2017     Bachelor of Fine Art (Interdisciplinary Drawing), Griffith University (Queensland College of Art), Brisbane

2014     Diploma of Graphic Design, Griffith College, Brisbane

2013     Diploma of Product Design (Incomplete), Shanghai Art & Design Academy, Shanghai

Group Exhibition

2018   Changemakers Symposium, Melbourne

2017   UNSW Art & Design Graduate Exhibition, Sydney

2017   Sydney Contemporary/Art Fair, Sydney

2016   Queensland College of Art Graduate Exhibition, Brisbane

2016   Brisbane Street Art Festival/Mural, Brisbane

2015   Drawing International Brisbane/Symposium, Brisbane