How (Not) to Read Playboy: Interview with Guo Jian, John McDonald and Maggie Wu
25 April, 2025
Guo Jian: Nothing About Erotic But Playboy is a stunning array of works from acclaimed artist Guo Jian, spanning a 25-year period while tracking his personal and artistic development.
It may be a truism that an artist makes their art (both metaphorically and literally), yet Guo Jian seems to be the apogee of this tendency. Defying stylistic definition, he presents viewers with a collision of artistic references from baroque Christian forms to Robert Capa’s war photography, with a healthy dash of cultural revolutionary ballet. Nevertheless, embellished within his often slapstick style, one cannot help but recognize the presence of memory and biography seeping into the very fibres of his canvases. These are all themes that Rochfort Gallery Director Maggie Wu, curator of the exhibition John McDonald, and Guo Jian himself attest to, in their own way, throughout this interview, and underlie this exhibition.
Guo Jian: Nothing About Erotic But Playboy runs from the 16th of April to the 7th of June 2025 at Rochfort Gallery (Ground Floor, 317 Pacific Hwy, North Sydney NSW 2060).
Guo Jian, Untitled No. 1 (2024), Acrylic on Canvas, 200× 300cm. White Rabbit Collection, Sydney. Image Courtesy of Rochfort Gallery
Kye Fisher: What qualities of Guo Jian's work attracted the gallery to display Guo Jian's works? As a gallery with a commercial tint, are there any specific qualities you look for when choosing to exhibit work?
Maggie Wu (Director of Rochfort Gallery): As a commercial gallery known for both maturity and keen market insight, our criteria for selecting artists consistently centres on three key pillars: academic merit, a distinctive visual language, and sustainable market potential. Mr Guo Jian exemplifies all of these qualities.
We chose to work with Guo Jian because his practice seamlessly combines scholarly depth with strong market viability, while also carrying profound historical reflection and contemporary resonance. His work is not merely a visual statement—it is a kind of spiritual self-portrait, forging powerful connections between personal memory and collective narrative.
As a significant artist bridging Chinese and Australian cultural contexts, Guo Jian’s work invites interpretation on multiple levels: from articulations of migrant identity to reflections of the zeitgeist; from innovations in visual form to the continuation of cultural legacies. His work is held in major institutional collections, including the National Gallery of Australia, and this exhibition marks the first comprehensive presentation of the artistic transformation he underwent during his period of withdrawal from the public eye. It reveals how an artist, through introspection, may arrive at a new height of creative clarity.
1. Artistic Achievements and Professional Recognition
Guo Jian stands as one of the most significant figures among Chinese-Australian artists. He was represented for over two decades by the renowned Ray Hughes Gallery, one of Australia’s leading art institutions. His work is held in major collections, including the National Gallery of Australia. Guo has received numerous accolades, such as the Fisher’s Ghost Art Award, and has contributed to high-profile interdisciplinary projects, including stage design for the Australia-New Zealand Music Festival. These achievements reflect the remarkable breadth of his creative practice.
2. Unparalleled Artistic Distinctiveness
Guo Jian’s work is rooted in the reconstruction of historical narratives through personal memory. His fragmented yet poetic visual storytelling offers metaphors that resonate across broader social and political contexts. His recent work, created during a period of deliberate withdrawal, is shaped by deep introspection—both personal and societal—resulting in a compelling tension between time, space, and memory. His highly distinctive visual language lends his work an immediately recognisable presence.
3. The Rarity and Value of His Return
At the height of his career, Guo Jian made the deliberate decision to withdraw from the public eye. His recent work further explores this act of retreat as a strategy of resistance against the homogenising effects of globalisation—using self-isolation to recalibrate his gaze and reposition his perspective.
The most academically significant aspect of this exhibition lies in the first-ever public presentation of his “withdrawn period” sketches, alongside a matrix of earlier and recent works. These pieces—whether iconic canvases sealed away by time or experimental drafts never before seen—resemble archaeological fragments of an artistic fossil record. Together, they help us reconstruct the elusive, long-obscured chapter in Guo Jian’s creative journey.
Gallery Space. Left to right. Guo Jian Untitled No. 8 (2009), Oil on Canvas, 152× 213cm; Guo Jian Untitled No. 5 (2007), Oil on Canvas, 152× 213cm; Guo Jian, Trigger Happy No. 9 (2008), Oil on Canvas, 152× 213cm. Image Courtesy of Rochfort Gallery.
Kye Fisher: How do you think your curatorial perspective challenges or endorses prevailing discourses surrounding Guo Jian's works?
Maggie Wu: This curatorial project challenges mainstream understandings of Guo Jian’s practice through three interwoven dimensions.
The first is temporal. While much critical attention has been paid to Guo Jian’s active period during the 1990s and early 2000s, this exhibition shifts focus to the artistic transformation that occurred during his years of self-imposed silence. It is the first time that works from this so-called “withdrawn period” will be comprehensively presented, shedding light on a continuity of practice that has often been overlooked. Through these rarely seen pieces, we explore the artist’s visual strategies for resisting the alienation of time itself.
The second is identity. Rather than reinforcing the label of “Chinese artist,” the exhibition reveals how Guo Jian transforms personal memory into works of profound cross-cultural resonance. Many of the pieces in this show can be read as spiritual self-portraits, offering a multi-layered entry point into his experience. At a time when academic discourse often frames his work through the lens of diasporic identity, we seek to reconsider “marginality” not as a static condition but as a generative space—where personal trauma and cultural displacement are transfigured into forms that invite universal reading.
The third is formal. By exhibiting preparatory sketches alongside monumental paintings, we foreground the artist’s process of doubt, revision, and renewal. These juxtapositions move beyond the polished aesthetic of so-called “finished works” and reveal a deeper philosophical engagement with destruction and reconstruction. In this way, the exhibition repositions Guo Jian’s practice not as a static body of work but as an evolving reflection of inner reckoning.
This exhibition is not simply a retrospective; it is framed by the curatorial proposition of Return/Reconstruction. Through the first public presentation of sketches and unfinished works from Guo Jian’s years of withdrawal—alongside a matrix of earlier and recent pieces—it reveals how artistic exile can act as a catalyst for a radical shift in creative DNA. This, we believe, is one of contemporary art’s most valuable qualities: the ability to reflect the spirit of the times through deeply personal expression.
We aim to demonstrate that an artist’s “silent period” often holds the most authentic traces of their practice. Through careful sequencing of works and the spatial narrative of the exhibition, visitors are invited to glimpse the depth of an artistic consciousness that, though absent from public view, was never dormant. On the contrary, it entered a more profound dimension of creative inquiry.
In this sense, Guo Jian’s retreat from the art world was not an end, but a transformation—an alternative mode of making, in which artistic ideas are renewed through lived experience. With this solo exhibition, we hope not only to shed light on the persistence of his practice during years of self-imposed silence, but also to consider how a commercial gallery might activate critical and contemporary dialogue through academically engaged curatorship.
Kye Fisher: A lot of these works, such as Playboy No. 2 (2025), trade in the visual language of the Cynical Realist movement of the mid- to late-1990s. Yet in the intervening time, China has undergone huge economic and socio-political paradigm shifts. Are these works still successful and salient critiques of Chinese society, or, could they be considered somewhat anachronistic?
Guo Jian (Artist): I was never actually part of the movement that has been labelled “Cynical Realism.” When I painted what are now sometimes retrospectively associated with that movement—some of my earliest works—they weren’t even allowed to be shown in China. Even here in Australia, my exhibitions and activities have often been ignored, obstructed, or cancelled. I’ve never taken part in, nor been invited to participate in, any exhibitions or events related to that so-called movement—either in China or in Australia. In truth, I’ve always been a solitary figure, narrating to myself, operating outside the mainstream.
I stopped continuing the same narrative mode quite early on. I’ve always sought to do something different—especially after 2014, when I was detained and deported from China back to Australia. The exhibitions I’ve done since then have dealt with themes such as the environment and pandemic lockdowns. My last show in Melbourne was about the lockdown experience, and, as usual, it received no critical attention or media coverage. I wasn’t particularly surprised. I’ve long become accustomed to being overlooked, whether directly or indirectly.
The most recent series of paintings I’ve been working on likewise has no connection to “Cynical Realism.” The current political and artistic climate in China has, in many ways, returned to the fragile atmosphere I experienced in my youth. That reality has reawakened some long-blurred memories and personal experiences, which formed the basis for this new body of work. My response as an artist was simply instinctive—and since I happened to be collaborating with a gallery at the time, the exhibition came together naturally, almost inevitably.
As for whether there’s a critical or political dimension to the work, my focus is more on how I feel as an individual and as an artist. In today’s world, simply choosing not to conform or to give in to fear is already one of the most difficult and meaningful forms of social participation.
Guo Jian, Playboy No. 2 (2025), Acrylic on Canvas. 61×46cm. Image courtesy of Rochfort Gallery.
Kye Fisher: Guo Jian has an expansive practice across other media, from photography to meat sculpture! Therefore does the assemblage of paintings in Nothing About Erotic But Playboy reveal anything or relate to his works in other media?
Guo Jian: The use of particular artistic symbols or media is, for me, simply a matter of responding to creative needs and practical conditions. It’s a choice—often intuitive, sometimes circumstantial. I’ve had many ideas over the years involving the use of raw meat as a medium, but the reality of making such work happen in Australia has proved quite difficult.
There were three occasions when I had the opportunity to create meat-based installations in collaboration with public galleries or major art fairs in the US and Australia. Of those, only the one in the United States—at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Miami—actually came to fruition. That project was jointly funded by the museum and myself, though I contributed the majority of the budget.
The other two projects in Australia were cancelled, both times due to concerns over cost and hygiene regulations—at least, that was the explanation given by the organisers. Given those constraints, painting has naturally returned as the most effective medium of expression for me at this stage. I tend to follow what feels possible and authentic—I don’t force things, neither on myself nor on others.
Kye Fisher: The works have a clear thematic and stylistic throughline, yet range from totally monochromatic (such as 1979, 2001) to vividly full coloured (such as Playboy no. 1, 2025) and come in vastly different sizes. How has the gallery negotiated these sharp contrasts in their curation?
John McDonald (Curator): The reason the works vary between colour and black and white is that coloured works are usually twenty years old or even more. They're the works that Guo Jian did in his early days in Australia. The new works are revisiting the themes of his time in the army, but the memories are getting more distant. He wants to distinguish these new works from the old, so he doesn't want to make it look like they're exactly the same kind of thing. In fact, in the new pieces, he's adopted a totally different style, where he has these very small soldiers with the sunglasses on, acting like little children, as though they're playing. The older Guo Jian, twenty years older than what he was when he was doing those original paintings, is, I think, a little bit wiser and more cynical and perhaps has a few scars from his previous run ins with the Chinese authorities; therefore these paintings are much more subdued in a way, slightly deathly with the bottom black and white.
There's a seriousness and a kind of elegiac quality to these works that is not the case in the early ones, which are very in your face, very pop, quite satirical and cynical. There's a crazy energy in the first coloured pictures, that is not at all obvious in the second, the second series, the Black and Whites, he's a different person, but he's still looking back on those same themes.
To negotiate the different sizes of these works has been quite an effort, because Guo Jian seems to paint as the mood takes him on any size canvas he has, and so it's not easy to get them all to sit in a neat way on the wall. But the very anarchy of this, the contrasts, the ups and downs, are in a way characteristic of him. What we see in terms of the different sizes of the work is very much to do with the different sizes of Guo Jian’s imagination as he takes these things on, as he gets excited by a theme, as he finds an idea.
I hope the whole show has a kind of a wonderful roller coaster energy about it as we mix up the colour and the black and white, the past and the present.
Gallery Space, 2025, Image Courtesy of Rochfort Gallery.
Kye Fisher: These works demonstrate a heavy dose of autobiographical material, influenced by Guo's childhood in China, such as his sunglasses, used to evoke 'pi' culture. Is there therefore a disconnect in receptions between Chinese and Australian audiences, and how has the curation attempted to respond?
John McDonald: There's always a disconnection between Chinese and Australian audiences, but the things that he's showing in these pictures, I think would be quite unfamiliar to a lot of Chinese today.
When Guo Jian is reminiscing about his youth in China, and he joined the army at the age of seventeen, the idea of wearing sunglasses was really out of the box. He says that he thought of sunglasses as the things that villains wore in movies, or occasionally the hero would disguise themselves with a set of sunglasses. So when these teenage guys put on a set of sunglasses, they felt really cool, really pi. It was masquerade. They wanted to do all these things that they thought were very Western, very sophisticated, very naughty, very against the ideology of the day. So, the sunglasses in these paintings, with all these little runty soldiers wearing sunglasses, suggests a bunch of young hoodlums who are trying to be cool, trying to be tough guys, trying to be very classy, but really don't know what they're doing.
The sunglasses, which are badges of coolness, are also the kind of things that blind men wear. So, what he's saying is, in trying to be cool, they're really just stumbling around in the dark- they don't know what they're doing!
With the difference between Chinese and Australian audiences, I think a lot of Australian audiences have no understanding of what life would have been like in China in the sixties and seventies. It would be hard for them to even conceive what life was like. It's hard for them to conceive a world where the sexiest, most entertaining thing you could possibly imagine was the Red Detachment of Women, or a limited range of movies such that all you could get were propaganda films. They don't really know how limited the worldview was for people like Guo Jian and know as a teenager and how the army was a way out.
Living in Guizhou, the army was, he thought, his only way out of the provinces; otherwise he would live and die there in a small town and never get to see the world, never get to the big city, never get to follow his ambitions, which were to be an artist. Guo Jian worked as a propaganda artist in the army, which is probably a more attractive thing to do than going out firing a gun every day. But he had all the same training, he saw all the same violence, all the same narrowness, all the same moulding of personalities into mere machines.
When he got out, he experienced a severe reaction. He really asked himself, what had he been doing for the last four years? He felt like he didn't belong there, that he was a different person, that his headspace was completely disconnected from what he had done before.
I don't think any of this is easily translatable to Australian audiences. But for those who want to come and see these paintings and think about them and learn what's going on and respond to their mad satirical kind of verve, there's quite a lot to be taken from them and a lot you could learn about those days. So, Guo Jian, being a fascinating individual who has bridged that particular period in China and Australia today and is still mining his reminiscences. I think he's somebody who has a lot of lessons for us in terms of the way we relate to China, and the way we relate to the way that China has changed, moved, altered and evolved over the last twenty to thirty years.
Guo Jian, Untitled No. 2 (2025), Acrylic on Canvas, 126× 177cm. Image courtest of Rochfort Gallery.