Walking into a Blooming Season
2025.09.13 - 2025.11.01
Artist: Yage Guo
Curator: Qinru ZHOU
Flowers and portraits, as among the oldest and most enduring themes in art, carry significant meaning. Throughout the historical development of art in both the East and the West, these two themes have often intersected and merged. However, in the present day, for artists, they have long been liberated from traditional symbolic systems and endowed with personalized expressions. The rhetorical device of 'using flowers to represent people' transforms public symbols into private language.
Yage's creations are also influenced by ancient Chinese poetry. The ancients often used flowers to express emotions and likened flowers to people — subtlety and restraint have always been the unique hallmarks of Chinese aesthetics. Zhang Chao, a literati figure of the Qing Dynasty, once remarked: 'Plum blossoms inspire nobility, orchids evoke serenity, chrysanthemums suggest wildness, lotuses convey purity, spring crabapples exude charm, peonies radiate grandeur, banana leaves and bamboos embody refinement, autumn crabapples display allure, pines suggest leisureliness, paulownias bring freshness, and willows arouse sentiment.'
In Yage's works, flowers are like people—but far more than that. These plants tenaciously bloom their delicate and beautiful blossoms through the cycle of the seasons. In this process, you discover the secret of time — it originally holds no meaning until the approach of death endows each moment with a value that transcends its own essence. When everything is reborn, you can fully and directly savor the abundance of life: desire, loneliness, fantasy, melancholy, ecstasy, resilience, renunciation, loss, and reunion... Those aspects that you think confine you are actually the most wonderful parts of your life.
Whether it is a flower or a portrait, they are merely the artist's way of sketching a certain moment and aspect of her life. Therefore, the portraits in Yage's paintings always possess an ineffable mysterious quality. The longer you look at them, the more the deeper, more ancient, and more non - human aspects hidden behind these faces will be revealed to you, and they will be presented with absolute candor
This year marks the tenth anniversary of Yage's departure from China to the UK. The span of time is considerable, yet looking back, it already feels like yesterday. The artist 'uses flowers to represent people,' symbolizing none other than herself — lost and then reunited amid the passage of years. 'Everyone has their own forest... Those who are lost are lost, and those who meet will meet again.' She continued to move forward until she walking into a blooming season.
