Guo Jinping's Huarong Passage, 2002, with red-faced Guan Yu in green extending an arm towards pale-faced Cao Cao amid a crowded opera ensemble

Huarong Passage detail with the artist's red seal amid thick gold, black, white and blue paint

Huarong Passage — Chinese opera costume and figure detail

Huarong Passage detail with three Chinese-opera faces, ornate headdresses and a gold-textured stage

Huarong Passage — red and green opera colour detail

Huarong Passage — historical group scene detail

Huarong Passage — oversized artwork surface detail

Huarong Passage — full view and scale detail

Huarong Passage — signature and surface detail

Master

Huarong Passage

Name: Huarong Passage
Brand: Paint For Heart
Price: 71119.0 SGD
Availability: InStock

Artist Guo Jinping

Creation Date 2002

Material Oil on canvas

Size 167 x 172 cm

Category original

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Current total $71,119.00

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Perspectives

A closer look

Artwork Notes

Art appreciation

Guan Yu stands just right of centre, identifiable by his red face, long beard and green robe. One arm extends across the image while the other draws towards his chest. Cao Cao turns towards him from the left, a red sleeve forming a warm interval between their bodies. A figure at the lower right looks up towards Guan Yu, while further faces emerge among headdresses and armour. The crowd leaves little empty stage around the principals and concentrates the encounter within a dense formation.

Guo repeatedly builds and scrapes gold, ochre-brown, deep green and black. Paint rises almost like relief across headdresses and armour. Red and pale faces, black beards and Guan Yu's outstretched arm establish the principal figures; broken gold marks join the surrounding armour into a dense field. Ochre and black shapes still preserve each body's direction, so the heavy surface does not obscure the ensemble structure.

The central exchange is between Guan Yu and Cao Cao. In traditional versions, Zhang Liao travels with Cao as his officer and is also Guan Yu's former acquaintance; the other faces in this painting remain accompanying generals and standard-bearers rather than securely identified individuals. Guan Yu's extended arm closes the road while holding military duty, gratitude for Cao's earlier treatment and the claims of personal loyalty in one suspended moment.

Theme

Style and context

Cao Cao retreated through Huarong after the defeat at Red Cliffs. Guan Yu's ambush and release of Cao belong chiefly to Romance of the Three Kingdoms and its later operatic life. On stage, Guan Yu appears in red facial make-up and Cao Cao in jing facial design. Colour, beard, headdress and codified gesture establish identity and allegiance. The conflict turns on Guan Yu's military order and the debts of honour linking him to Cao and Zhang Liao.

Guo graduated from the fine arts programme of Shanxi Provincial Opera School. His knowledge of facial design, costume, formation and stage movement provides a direct basis for treating opera as pictorial structure. He keeps Guan Yu's and Cao Cao's faces and gestures clearest and embeds the surrounding cast in dense paint. A conflict that unfolds through singing, speech, movement and combat is compressed into a group whose identities remain legible through stage codes and relationships.

Artist Profile

About the artist

Guo Jinping was born in 1970 in Shanxi and is now based in Songzhuang, Beijing. He graduated in 1991 from the Fine Arts Department of Shanxi Provincial Opera School, now Shanxi Arts Institute, where training in theatrical image-making and academic drawing formed the foundation of his later oil-painting practice. His work often brings Chinese opera, historical narrative, and large-scale oil painting into the same pictorial field.

Instead of treating opera as costume illustration, Guo uses facial patterns, armour, processional grouping, and heavy paint surfaces to give cultural stories a physical presence. His major creative directions include the Glory series and the True Light series, alongside works such as Heaven and Earth, Redemption, River of Life, Crossing the Red Sea, and Resurrection. From 1998 to 2002, Guo held consecutive solo exhibitions of his oil-painting ethnic-minority figure series at the China International Exhibition Center in Beijing.

In 2002, he was invited to exhibit at the former Museum of Revolutionary History, now the National Museum of China, and also presented at the China Millennium Monument. His later exhibition record includes the 2018 China-Korea Art Exchange Exhibition in Beijing and the 2019 Second Christ Contemporary Art Exhibition in New York, with works also shown in Korea, Australia, and Israel. He received the Ministry of Culture title of Outstanding Artist.

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