STAGE

STAGE 散场 Yaguan Guo Solo Exhibition

Date: 1 January - 1 February 2024

Venue: Park Art Space, 2-202, Building E, City One, Beijing, China

To welcome the arrival of 2024, Arthology with Park Art Space proudly presented “Scattered After the Feast”, a solo exhibition by renowned Chinese artist Guo Yaguan. This marked the third major project hosted by the space and the public debut of Guo’s long-gestating “Night Banquet” series — a body of work that intimately intertwines artmaking, social ritual, and the passage of time.

The exhibition grew from a unique premise: Guo’s studio has long been more than a workplace — it has been a social nexus, a gathering site for artists, friends, and collaborators over the years. These gatherings, especially a sequence of informal banquets spanning the summer and autumn of 2023, became the very material of his new paintings. In response, art critic Duan Shaofeng named the project Scattered After the Feast, capturing both the physical dispersal after social communion and the introspective residue left behind.

Displayed for the first time outside the artist’s private studio, this exhibition was more than a retrospective — it was a transformation. Through eleven large-scale paintings and a monumental scroll created on-site, Guo translated the revelry and rupture of these gatherings into rich visual forms. Figures appear distorted, luminous, even mythic; gestures freeze between movement and memory. The swimming pool motif, evoking the now-dismantled Roma Lake studio, floats like a dreamscape at the center of collective memory.

At the heart of the exhibition was a newly completed short film titled Scattered, edited from seven years of documentation (2016–2023). Juxtaposing intimate scenes of celebration with moments of demolition and silence, the film formed a lyrical backbone to the entire show. Guo’s camera lingers on bonfires, floating drinks, rooftop dance, excavators in ruins — a sequence of visual testimonies that trace the emotional arc from gathering to disappearance.

What emerges is not a nostalgic lament, but an elegy transformed by action. The works oscillate between the festive and the philosophical, offering viewers a glimpse into the rituals that shape not only Guo’s art, but also the broader artist community he sustains. “Scattered After the Feast” is both a farewell and a return — a stage set anew in a public space, where private memory is re-enacted as collective experience.

This exhibition ran from January 1 to February 1, 2024, featuring painting, video, and site-specific installation. It offered a powerful meditation on gathering, parting, and the unresolved spaces in between.