NOTHING ABOUT EROTIC BUT PLAYBOY
ROCHFORT GALLERY
26 April - 7 June 2025
Step into a world where propaganda meets performance and seduction meets satire. A magnifying glass examines periods of political upheaval and violence in China’s history. This breathtaking exhibition transforms the classical elegance of Rochfort Gallery - with its chandeliers, timber floors, and grand white walls - into a provocative stage of surreal, sensual, and subversive imagery.
Guo Jian is a Chinese Australian artist whose work reflects on the influence of China’s political ideology, particularly during the Cultural Revolution. Emerging from the Cynical Realism movement of the 1990s in Beijing, his art explores how propaganda and performance were used to stir patriotism and manipulate emotion. Guo Jian’s insights draw from his time as a People’s Liberation Army propaganda painter and his later role as a student protester during the 1989 Tiananmen Square uprising.
These Playboy paintings, and the larger images of runty soldiers wearing sunglasses that make them look like blind men, or a particularly deluded breed of hipster, show Guo Jian’s wit at its most mordant and savage. Whatever pornography might be found in the pages of a famous girlie magazine, pales into insignificance alongside the pornography of violence and ideological rectitude absorbed by those unwitting soldiers from the provinces. The black-and-white tones of these pictures, represent a worldview that was equally black-and-white, in which Mao and the Party were the very word of the law. If it’s not entirely a matter of nostalgia, that’s because Xi Jinping, who has declared himself President for life, seems intent on winding back the clock. Those days of smiling soldiers and trumped-up revolutionary fervour may soon be coming around again.
