VOL.5
Wu Guanzhen: Art Is Not the End, But a New Path
Artist Wu Guanzhen abandons the decorative craftsmanship of traditional lacquer art to focus on the essential materiality of raw lacquer. His work reconstructs a contemporary expression for the art form, applying it to ramie to create translucent "soft sculptures." This innovation plays with the interplay of light and shadow, blending the tangible and the illusory, and propels lacquer art into the realm of contemporary art.
In this episode of So GROTTO, we join him on a journey into the remembered mountains and forests. We explore the uncertain imagery of vines, bamboo groves, and streams that flow through his work. Using his chosen language of materials, he traces the path between tangible life and hazy dreams, inviting the audience to perceive his personal understanding of time's many dimensions.
He continually deepens into the flow of consciousness, seeking his own unique expression within this uncertainty. This pursuit is mirrored by his use of raw lacquer - which transforms over time - and translucent ramie, which allows light to pass through. These materials become his method for self-expression and dialogue with the world.
Wu Guanzhen reflects that his role as an artist grants him a certain latitude, yet this very freedom is mediated by art's capacity to open different avenues of thought for others. He posits that such freedom is less about individual action or speech, and more about a social-emotional condition: the mutual empathy and comprehension cultivated when people encounter the cognitive possibilities an artist offers.
Q&A
Q1. Could you introduce yourself and tell us about your recent work?
I'm Wu Guanzhen. I'm not too concerned with labels or defining my identity. For me, creation is a way to return to what's real. That's why my work over these past years has been about the mountains - about moving from imagined memories toward truth, and returning to everyday life to explore without so many constraints.
Q2. Could you discuss why you chose the lacquer medium, relating it to your childhood memories?
I grew up in northern Fujian, so the feeling of being surrounded by mountains on all sides has always stayed with me. Raw lacquer is a material taken directly from nature, which makes it feel very familiar to me. After experimenting with many materials, I felt a stronger emotional link to this one, and it allows me to express myself more naturally.
It's like how the food a person loves, the utensils they prefer to use, and the environment they grew up in all help shape their unique temperament. These memories from my life subtly guided me toward the choice of raw lacquer.
Q3. How do you integrate life and creative work? And how do you handle the emotional highs, like excitement, or anxieties during the creative process?
Life and creative work are inherently connected. I weave together many uncertain elements - sensations, dreams, real scenes - and this act of weaving them together becomes the very source of my creation.
When an idea sparks, it brings an intense, exciting inner drive. However, the nature of my materials prevents me from expressing it immediately. During this time, I must continue living, attending to ordinary, everyday tasks.
Yet creation is a lengthy journey, a kind of fusion and negotiation. The thrill slowly dissipates as it assimilates the scattered sentiments of everyday existence. Like small streams merging into a great river, it all transforms into a continuous current of being.
Q4. Why did you choose ramie as the carrier for your lacquer? How did this choice come about?
Because its open-grid, hollow texture is perfectly suited for giving a tangible form to these uncertainties.
So, I patch together the state of plants from my memory with their state in reality. But during this process of patching, an indescribable feeling emerges through the ramie material, and its hollow characteristic further accentuates this. For example, the reflection of a landscape in water, the scenery I see from a car window, or the view while walking - it might be the same landscape, but my perception of it is always different.
My creative process is about capturing the uncertainty of these moments and then searching for a definitive way to express it. After I've articulated it through the language of painting, when the ramie material is presented in different contexts, a new kind of uncertainty emerges, which I find quite fascinating. It both exists and does not exist - this describes the state perfectly, much like the reed bed outside my studio.
Q5. From a creator's viewpoint, how would you describe your relationship with "time"?
I consider my art a process of weaving together the different dimensions of time as I perceive it. It's a way of documenting personal time, and this documentation creates what I feel is the accumulated weight of time - something deeply individual and meaningful.
It's a bit like entering my own dimension of time. For instance, the work "Poetry" is composed of dots. But as the lacquer flows and drips, it forms different coagulated states on the surface. For me, it possesses the naturalness of time's passage, and each dot is like a raindrop.
That's my personal expression. But others might not see raindrops - to them, it's just a dot. This is my temporal world, an invitation for viewers to step inside. Yet they might also see a completely different world, and I often look forward to the feedback that viewers bring.
Q6. What does your ideal state of freedom look like?
To me, freedom is a conscious departure into uncharted ways of living - yet it never means idleness. True freedom lives in that dopamine of fulfillment when you set a goal through exploration and bring it to life. For now, I see freedom as the ability to create my own personal "outing" in daily life.
”I believe the most important role of art is to offer a path for thought, not a model to follow.”