Guo Hongwei was born in 1982 in Sichuan, China. His quietly powerful portraits, based on snapshots from his childhood, are notable for their spare use of colour. The artist isolates the most personally meaningful figures in a photograph, translates them into shades of blue or gray, and then places them on the canvas against a neutral background. The resulting monochrome paintings are reminiscent of fine Chinese porcelain while also referencing the traditions of black and white photography, recast and reinvented in blue and white. His painting technique is just as remarkable – avoiding the conventions of heavy layering, he applies and dissolves the oil instead, to build and blur the figures; mimicking the way memory operates in the mind.