Location: United States
Guigen Zha is a Los Angeles-based visual artist. He had an MFA in painting from the University of Missouri-Columbia in 2018. Zha’s paintings have been selected for many exhibitions and awards, for example, the Second Asian Art Biennial in Hong Kong; Harmony: Contemporary Chinese Exhibition of Small Oil Paintings in Tokyo Metropolitan Art Museum, and in Beijing of China Oil Painting Institute Art Museum; Dynamics: Chinese Contemporary Oil Painting Research Exhibition, Kunstraum Villa Friede, Bonn, Germany; Winner of the 50th, 54th Creative Quarterly International Art Competition in New York; the Zhou B Spirit Award at the National Wet Paint MFA Biennial 2018 in Chicago; and selected on the cover of Circle Quarterly Art Review magazine in 2021. His works and artistic achievements have been published in China Daily, Chinese L.A. Daily, Contemporary Oil Painting, Global Art, et al.
Third Space of Artist statement
My Third Space series presents a personal, virtual and artistic space where the artist is playing there, lonely but liberated.
• Personal: artist self-portrait with nudity.
• Virtual: images projecting to the artist’s body as an environment.
• Artistic: restructure by using an approach of appropriation of artistic images or elements on canvas (artist body).
• Playable: artist performing (as model posing) in a virtual scene.
• Lonely: privacy and exclusivity
• Liberated: Unrestrained expression of ideas as well as unbridled venting of dissatisfaction.
The Yellow was created to show the identity under the mood of being in the pandemic by using a self-portrait with nudity.
• The Gate was inspired by Dali’s “Slave Market With the Disappearing Bust of Voltaire”. It was created under an atmospheric mood that I had to think about a racial issue with Assembly Bill 3121 and “the Task Force to Study and Develop Reparation Proposals for African Americans” in California. The Gate is one of My Third Space series. Third Space presents a personal, virtual, and artistic space where the artist is playing there, lonely but liberated by using a self-portrait with nudity.
“Third Space. Yellow”
“Third Space. • The Gate ”
