Children are a frequent theme in Guo Jin's work, meditations upon pure joy and unadultered idealism. Sliding captures a group of three moving with grace and abandon down an unseen slide behind them. Their movement is innocent, capturing a moment of play, but when the children are considered as stand-ins for something greater, whether that be society or the state of a country, the painting takes on greater complexities: does the downward slide imply loss or danger, and if so, what is the childrens' agency? Did they initate this descent, or plunge into it unwittingly? Guo Jin's work gives itself to many different readings, but the painting's sense of momentum and unknown potential remains constant.

A word from The Artist

Changes in our lives lead to dreams based on nostalgia, as opposed to a vision for the future. The backwards-looking nature of our ideals causes us to look at them as if they were a beautiful work of art. It is like living in a world intermingled with fantasy and reality. The past becomes our own fairytale, evoking a long-lost feeling of being alive. Although it is brief and illusory, this nostalgia drives people to constantly collect from the past, never realizing the beauty of true idealism.