In the present age we often find absence of ethical consciousness, disquieting values and norms, and gaps between imagination and reality. Due to these problems contemporary people are driven to a state of split self. This state is right now invisible and latent, but is revealed as diverse aspects with far-reaching powers. These elements as problems do not disappear as my nature does not die out even if I hid behind the mirror. In a situation where similarity has lasted customarily, such ironic situations start from the denial of such similarity.
What I especially note in the exhibition is the spirit of ‘distance’ in his work. Distance here includes an external distance between the self and the world and an internal distance between disrupted selves. In this respect Guan Yong’s work has irony’s non-lyrical trait, by nature.

A new sign appears in Guan Yong’s work around late 2010: images created with mirrors emerge in his work: divided left and right, up and down, space in each scene discords with its time. If seen in a glimpse, a scene may look like a scene of his previous work, showing arrangements of books and figures. Under close examination however, the gap between space and time is visible, like a mid-course or phase seems abbreviated or cut out, causing confusion in viewers for a while. In early work Guan Yong sensitively represented a confrontational structure between the past and present, the present and future, society and individual. In his 2011 work Gray heralding the onset of the confrontational structure between external and internal selves the ‘external distance between the self and the world and an internal distance between disrupted selves’ I mentioned above emerges.

It is not sure whether Guan Yong has realized this difference or not, but he probably felt an alienated spirit and value in this era with his sense as an artist at Bacon’s filthy studio, an assembly place of the great artist’s agony. Guan Yong’s work addressing Bacon’s studio as subject matter does not merely represent his studio but reflects the artist himself by using the equipment of an invisible mirror. He had consistently depicted a process of split of the self due the gap between reality and ideal in his previous work whereas the gap between I in reality and I in my inner self is dissolved in this work due to paint deposits, like surplus physical property, showing a gesture of harmony. However, the artist still alludes to the self in discord.

Kim Mi-Ryoung (Interalia Art Director, Art Studies)