OurGirl: Confessions of a Magazine Junkie

From the "I Want to be a Child that has the Right to Choose series," Juo Gin, China

I'm a terrible magazine junkie. i love, love, love racks and racks of printed publications and our local borders bookstore has a particularly satisfying book rack. Way back, about 1998, i was an avid reader of ARTnews. Its a magazine all about the art scene—trends, profiles, the ins and outs of the art world—really fascinating stuff and a world totally apart from my existence. i was flipping through an issue when i saw an ad placed by Flanders Contemporary Art, promoting the work of guo jin. i remember having a very distinct, gut reaction seeing his series, I Want to be the Child that has the Right to Choose. i decided right then I would own one of those paintings and that was an odd idea in contrast to my background. why where i'm from, people just didnt go around buying original oil paintings from the chinese advant garde movement. i remember my mom trying to convince me it would be a bad idea. she felt they looked like abortions. i couldnt be dissuaded. i would own one. i contacted flanders, spoke to a rep and they sent me photos of the work. among the images of little boys and girls, i saw her: a portrait of a remote little girl, dreamily contemplating a flower and dressed in historical garb. out of the four or five paintings they had in the series, she was mine. i scrapped, freelanced, used tax return funds and got the money to flanders. she came in a wood box, carefully protected and i refuse to have her framed. i prefer the apple green background to visually ooze out onto the wall. she has adorned a prominent wall wherever i have called home, safe from UV rays and sun bleaching. she is beautiful. i have never regret the purchase. after a while, i have tried to find a few of her brothers and sisters, but sadly, the prices are now far beyond my reach.

here is background information regarding Guo Jin, and his brother:

Guo Wei and Guo Jin, born in 1960 and 1964, respectively, come from Chengdu, a city in southwest China; both were educated at the Sichuan Academy of Fine Art in Chongqing. They are leading members of a group of Sichuan artists who have been at the forefront of recent artistic developments in China. Old enough to remember the Cultural Revolution, the brothers, like everyone else in China, have been affected by the one-family, one-child policy of the Mao era: the elder has made his only daughter's development a major theme in his art. Both frequently depict children.

Guo Jin says of his art that it is a “reflection and contemplation of man’s naiveté”, that in representing children as he does he wants to try to retrieve the “beauty of the idealism that we were unaware of but that once we had.”

Freedom is another important element in Guo Jin’s work. Freedom is expressed in this child subject matters, seen being very nimble and playful in their movements. Again, this also touches on the new freedom of creation which now exists in the Chinese artistic communities that Guo Jin can take Chinese icons such as the emperor, the PLA soldier, the Red Guard and Lei Feng (the model communist comrade widely used in propaganda campaigns), or western imports such as Zorro or Batman, and use them playfully. Misuse of national icons or use of foreign symbols could have resulted in severe repercussions under the unrelenting regime of the Cultural Revolution. This series of works is also about imagination and the freedom of choice facing a child, its freedom to choose what it wants to be, again a novelty in a country that until recently decided for its young what they should study.