Hive Center for Contemporary Art is thrilled to announce our sole representation of artist Guo Yaguan with the presentation of his first solo exhibition, ‘Necklace’, opening on 8 March at Hive Beijing. This exhibition represents a milestone in the artist’s long-term project ‘Necklace’, focusing on his preparations and practice that feature different mediums such as painting, installation, video, and documentation, spanning seven years. These interconnected pieces precisely exemplify Guo’s creative tenet, that is, the intimate relationship between poetry and reality and the broader issues of action, life experience, and even free will. This exhibition is curated by Yang Jian and will be on view until 5 May 2025.

Guo Yaguan’s capability to sublimate everyday objects into ritual vehicles is rooted both in his institutional background of realist painting and in the painting approach, marked by his keen personal aesthetics and emotional attachment. Through the performance of dépense on the specific meaning of the painted objects, he disrupts the practicality and reality of them, thus initiating a logic similar to George Bataille’s ‘heterology’, which transports him into the realm of the sacred and forbidden. While without an indication of any distinct religious reference, Guo’s works not only encompass grand narratives similar to religious symbolism but also imply the ritual transformations of everyday private behaviours. He deliberately strips away the certainty of religious rituals. Through the juxtaposition of sacred symbols and trivial mundane objects, he dismantles the fixed meaning of the symbols in the tension between the sublime and the trivial. He deconstructs the ‘rituals’ above the sacred into a universal, everyday way of perception of life, thus achieving the bilateral establishment of ritual.

Significantly, the underlying ‘ritual’ in Guo Yaguan’s works emphasises a ‘window time’ that is randomly triggered. For this reason, the project ‘Necklace’, like every one of Guo’s creations, initially began as a coincidence, a moment of suspension from everyday routine, and a spark for poetic and artistic performance. This time, Guo met and talked to the sacred Mount Kailash in his dream, and after waking up, he clearly remembered his promise to give a necklace to the Mountain in his disorderly dream. The artist immediately decided to honour such a promise and plotted the realisation of this absurd yet romantic, personal yet grandiose art project.

From 2016, Guo Yaguan had grown his hair until 2023, when, in the process of his performance work, he cut off each strand of his long hair, a material carrying personal dynamics and time, served as a vessel for his emotions and state of being. One day in 2023, his performance of kora, the pilgrimage circulating around the mountain, marked the complete process as the artist put on a necklace for the sacred mountain. In the process of kora, the artist strung together the rocks around him with the hair he had just trimmed off, piling them up to become Mani stones that represent a complex symbolism and ceremony. There, countless piles of Mani stones in various shapes and heights are successively connected by the artist’s hair strands, and after a series of liminal experiences caused by altitude sickness, physical discomfort, and exhaustion from extreme natural environments of scorching heat and torrential rains, he had finally stretched a necklace of fifty-six kilometres, with hair threads and Mani stone piles as the ornaments to encircle Mount Kailash’s entire main peak. Without consciously looking from a close distance, one may not be able to notice the necklace at all. But it is between the tangible and the intangible where Sanctuary occupies a special boundary, and the exploration and delineation of this boundary becomes Guo’s work. Guo Yaguan’s works often wander, witness, and record in this state of boundary, which in itself implies a kind of intervention, while he has habitually and naturally transformed from a bystander to a participant and co-conspirator in all. There is a poetic expression of futility in ‘Necklace’ and many of Guo’s past projects (e.g., ‘Dirty Miracle (2022)’, etc.), which correspond to Camus’s meaningless heroism as Sisyphus roll a boulder up a hill and the Zen wisdom of impermanence. Perhaps the artist is compiling a fable through the form of meaninglessness to confront the ruins of modernity and refine poetry in futility.

After completing the kora necklace performance and documentation, Guo Yaguan returned to his studio to revisit the whole art performance with continuous large-scale paintings. Although the imbalance created by altitude sickness and extreme physical experience renders the memory of this performance no longer reliable, it accidentally reveals a certain sense of transcendence, where reality and fantasy closely intertwine. Guo Yaguan has never wanted to pursue a utopia to escape from reality, but instead to expose the dystopia of existence by painting the negated reality. In this context, art becomes a transient salvation against the void. He captures the erosion traces of time on material and life through his paintings of mani stone piles where the façades are decayed and carved, revealing the internal fluidity and chaos, signalling a sameness in nature and humanity as they share the fragility and vicissitude given by time. At the same time, he presents the ‘decay of things’ as a reflection of ‘the here’, as the erosion of time on material becomes a metaphor for the finiteness of human existence. The ‘sinking’ of material and life in time is dignified with a tragic sublimity; in addition, the passage of material does not imply a demise of the soul. Guo Yaguan’s portrayal of the ‘process of passage’ is a response to the ‘pure time’, where the visual perception delayed in the images is not a slice of physical time, but rather the ‘continuity of memory’ solidified into a visible ‘time-material’ composite through the accumulation of paint and gradual change of form.

In the process of visual violence and tearing up the image, Guo Yaguan removes the mani stone piles as the subject from its original context and transforms it into a mystical symbol that is constructed by the artist in an existing space and reconstructed in the image. The sacred and absurd symbols in the images do not exist in isolation but appear to be a ‘receiver of energy frequency’, reconfiguring the interpenetrating relationship of ‘body-space’ on the flattened canvas. Here, the viewer’s sensory experience is being pulled into the energy field of the works, taking part in the decoding of symbols within the field of their physical existence. The artist transforms art into a temporary ritual to resist the dissipation of meaning, in which the viewer is not only a participant in the ritual, but also a vessel of entropy-reducing energy, a ‘cohesion of meaning’, and a response to the ‘poetic dwelling’ in the era of ruins.

The artist’s entire art performance and the clips of his preparation process are edited in the form of a documentary, in which the flow of emotions in the arduous process of creating the ‘necklace’ and prolonged history of hair growth is authentically recorded. The artistic and ritualistic performance and the artist’s sense of reality together portray his vibrant personal state and shifting creative emotions. The documentary screens are placed in the middle of this exhibition hall in the form of a triangular enclosure like the mountain peak, permeating in the style of cyclical chanting to every corner of the exhibition, suggesting that the reality of time and space has never been divorced. For the artist, the juxtaposition of documentary film, painting, and on-site installation in the exhibition space structurally testifies his creative intention of ‘entering the potential existence through reality’ and serves as a visual practice of his ‘virtual and reality’ dialectic. The ascending line of sight in the paintings, the displacement of the audience’s body and viewing in the theatric exhibition, and the frequency resonance of the energy in the installation all lead to the disruption of the perception-movement scene. The viewer seems to be thrown into a topological intersection where Heidegger’s world, Harman’s ‘real object’, and Buddhism’s void intersect and coexist in a non-logical way, co-constructing a poetic realist world.