MEET TANG HAI GUO

It has taken some serious wrangling, but I've finally managed to interview and photograph a cool artist here in China. Tang Hai Guo is a young expressionist painter who lives in Shenzhen. He opened up his home/studio to me this past weekend and I was really quite impressed. We spent hours taking paintings out of a storage closet and arranging them for the photo. His integrity was what really struck me. Tang's style of art is not the type that most Chinese would buy to decorate their homes, but it is what he feels, so he paints in spite of the market. A lot of his paintings are subtle (or not so subtle) critiques of what he sees as the run-away greed and selfishness of many Chinese. Tang believes that by celebrating what is wrong with this world on a canvas it becomes part of a cathartic process of eradicating it from our lives. His wife cooked Julie and I the best meal we've had had here in China. You can view more  of Tang's work by clicking here.