Kuo Tian

2005–2008,

attended the Secondary School of Fine Arts

2008–2012,

Studied at the Guangzhou Academy of Fine Arts, awarded a Bachelor’s degree

2018 – present,

Studying at the State Academy of Fine Arts, Stuttgart

In 2024, the Beijing-born artist Kuo Tian will be entering his seventh year in Germany. His journey through space and time spans two countries, which he is constantly rediscovering and misinterpreting, and two eras, separated from one another by the fragility of memory yet secretly linked. 
Born and raised in a country where nothing remains unchanged, Tian has developed a keen sense of the ephemeral. He transforms space and time into his artistic kaleidoscope, through which all events that have entered his world are translated into his visual language. The motifs in Tian’s paintings are therefore the embodiment of the forces that lie latent in everyday reality, yet constantly strive to reveal themselves through their spontaneous encounter with the artist.
The world as the artist experiences it is fleeting, and Tian has become a stranger even in his own homeland, without finding a new home anywhere. For Kuo Tian, the identity that might otherwise help one come to terms with the chaotic events in society is something he must attain through his adventure in the unfamiliar reality of the societies of both countries – yet, in truth, he has never actually attained it.
Since his own identity has already presented him with an insoluble problem, Tian refrains from arbitrarily forcing his pictorial motifs into a harmonious order. His paintings are free playgrounds for the feelings, experiences and events that are just as rootless as he is and would otherwise be consigned to oblivion forever. And Tian sees his task as granting all his pictorial elements the maximum autonomy. This is where his artistic honesty lies. 
In the process, the distinction between the external and the internal, the social and the personal, representation and expression, loses its validity. For true art, Tian believes, should be precisely the force that unites all these divisions.