Chris Worfold

An Australian, Brisbane based artist, with an extensive exhibition history. He is course convener of the University of Canberra, Bachelor of Visual Arts program at TAFE Queensland Brisbane. He is a graduate from the Queensland College of Art, Griffith University and the Queensland University of Technology in Visual Arts and Education. Chris has been co-director of a commercial gallery, curated numerous exhibitions, written for catalogues and publications. He has completed public art, interior design and illustration commissions, served on arts committees and taught Visual Arts for over 15 years. He is dedicated to his arts practice and has exhibited internationally in Taipei, Seoul and New York.

Painting is like chasing down a dream. I’m like Richard Drefuss’s character in ‘Close Encounters of the Third Kind’ haunted by an image in his sub-conscious and obsessed with making different versions of it in an attempt to comprehend its source and significance. My work in ‘The Garden: New paintings’ contains certain elements and symbols that repeat; the Baroque folds of cloth, there is an almost spiritual comfort to fabric - the plurality of objects, the physical things that surround us, in this case flowers - the cryptic marks and fragments of words which symbolise the indecipherable and unknowable - the open or blank space of the horizon, a place to occupy, to visit or to pass through - and finally there are images of birds or wings, icons of both movement and transcendence of the corporeal world.

Kuo Bor-jou

Heart in Taiwan, Eyes to the World
Kuo Bor-jou’s “Garden at the Back of Taiwan” and “Sojourns in Europe” Series by Wang Tze-hsiung

Mixed media has been the technique frequently used by Kuo Bor-jou in his art works created while travelling throughout the world but with an outlook deeply rooted in his native Taiwan. Through his works Kuo tends to reveal the subtle moments when tradition merges with modernity, and when East communicates with West. In doing so, Kuo employs montage as his strategy of choice, whereby he would incorporate a broad range of everyday objects or their fragments into his works, displace the images from their contexts in time and space, and methodically rearrange them by way of collage to create pictures with overlapping layers, rich texture and a sense of humour. While being saturated with wild imaginations, his works often evoke a poetic mood.

Kuo’s recent works show the attitude of a more mellow and confident artist after he turned 50. Having been educated and influenced by Western art over the years, he is now manoeuvring to return to the Eastern aesthetic ideas as his new artistic approach, to retouch the Western culture from the viewpoint of an Oriental painting poet and to awaken those dormant memories of life. His works manifest a sophisticated effort to fuse together the Eastern literature, philosophy and aesthetics and keep them refined, so as to endow his art with a great degree of fluency, rhythm and momentum. Kuo has been adhering to the motto “Focus on the wholeness not details, to ensure liveliness of the work” in his artistic rejuvenation process.

John Dahlsen