Chinese Contemporary Artist Liao Guohe’s “Bad Paintings” on Exhibition in Nanjing 2 Favorite 

Liao Guohe’s solo exhibition ----“Satisfaction Guaranteed”, the first-time all-round summary of his paintings in last 10 years, is held from November 14, 2014 to March 14, 2015 at Sifang Art Museum in Nanjing, China.

As the only one of his alternative kingdom, Liao created lots of kinky and charming art works, which has been keeping rolling the Chinese contemporary arts world since the late 1990s. Born in Calcutta, India, in 1977, and now lives and works in Changsha, China, Liao created an unique language of painting: “bad painting”, despite having a deep understanding of the traditions of Chinese ink and Western oil paintings.

Liao makes a large-scale falsification and deconstruction over social norms and fairy tales, and reconstructs them in a ridiculous and vulgar way. His works focus on delivering a message through defiance of the "proper" and declaring criticism and irony to issues in Chinese politics and contemporary society, like social justice and moral values of ordinary people.

In his new Justice series, he cartoonishly scrawls the two Chinese characters for “justice” on each work, in an attempt to explore the present and future possible meanings of the word. In the series, the words are coughed up in red by a rooster, flying with migratory birds, and scrawled on the buttocks in Mike Kelley’s “Twin Henrys.”

One of these pictures uses black and blue line to portray justice: a crying man bends over in front of a slyly smiling bear pointing a gun at him, while handing a teardrop to a boozing potbellied figure with a police cap. These three figures: the toy-like bear, the powerlessness of the major one, and his indifferent companion can easily intrigue patrons’ imagination. The feature of sufficient subtle meanings is also true with Liao’s other works.

Moreover, Liao experiments with industrial linen cloths as canvas for arts in the exhibition. The combination of rough texture and harsh brushstrokes reflects stereotypes of working class’s bad tastes. Besides, in The Truth of Painting Blowing Gently(2013), an old bald man cuddles with a blond woman in a swing, while he carelessly paints on a canvas with his feet. The goofy content and sexual innuendo ridicules and questions the definition of painting and the current environment of art.