Gu Yi: The Wilderness Inside the Concrete Order
Step into Gu Yi’s studio, tucked away in the mountains of Chongzhou, Chengdu, and your senses are instantly hit by the smell of damp earth, wild plants, and the gritty scent of acrylics mixed with oil pastels. Weasels have made a home in the courtyard walls, and turtles wait in ambush by the pond. Here, he watches birds, grows fruit trees, and lives a deliberate "slow life," keeping a healthy distance from the hustle of the commercial world.
Yet, open one of his portfolios, and you will find nothing gentle or idyllic. Instead, you are met with a raw, wild energy - a world of claws, teeth, and the smell of mud.
“When I paint, I want to summon the wildness that sleeps beneath the paper,” Gu Yi says.
The main entrance to Guyi's studio
The Vanishing Mountains and a Star Wars Utopia
Gu Yi spent his childhood in Panzhihua, an industrial city built from scratch in the subtropical wilderness of Southwest China.
Back then, the city was still a rough construction site. Just a few steps from his door lay wild mountains, ponds, and endless fields. Squirrels scampered across roofs, birds squabbled on air con units, and snakes peeked out from drainage ditches. To a young Gu Yi, wild animals were not a distant "landscape" - they were neighbours and childhood playmates.
“It felt just like George Lucas’s Star Wars,” Gu Yi recalls. In that sci-fi universe, humans and all kinds of strange creatures live together naturally and equally. No one rules, and no one is superior.
However, this simple balance was soon crushed by the wheels of rapid urbanisation. By the time he returned from his university studies, the wild hills and rivers of his childhood were gone. The schools and homes he once knew had been replaced by cold highways and concrete fountains. The fast-paced expansion of industry had swallowed his childhood playground.
For Gu Yi, making art about nature is not a lecture on environmentalism. It is a deeply personal act of rebuilding - a way to recreate, through imagination, a non-anthropocentric utopia where humans and animals co-exist as equals.
Childhood, Gu Yi, 2025
Building a Quiet Ark Amid Conventional Success
At the beginning of his career as an artist, Gu Yi followed a very traditional path for an East Asian artist. He worked at a state-run design institute, drawing neat, orderly architectural blueprints. He also followed the standard rules of official art exhibitions: drafting a precise sketch first, and then scaling it up to fill in the colours once a commission or exhibition slot was secured. It was a safe, respectable path - one that many young artists dream of.
But along the way, Gu Yi noticed how his peers were being worn down. Once a certain style gained market or official approval, artists often fell into a loop of endless self-repetition. Repetition kills intuition, and high financial rewards often come at the cost of artistic sensitivity.
“When an artist returns to their true self, they should expect a bit of loneliness,” he notes.
He chose to walk away from that quick success. He retreated to his mountain courtyard and forced himself to slow down. Against the backdrop of a fast-evolving society, he sensed the hidden anxiety of modern people living under the pressure of efficiency. To him, art shouldn’t be a tool for profit; it should be a Noah’s ark, preserving our most honest sense of wonder and childlike curiosity.
Guyi's kitten assistant
Hunting for Treasure on a Blank Page: The Clash of Ink, Paper, and Acrylics
Upon returning to the mountains and wilderness, Gu Yi’s creative process underwent a complete rebellion.
He threw away his prepared sketches and rational designs, choosing instead to start with a completely blank sheet of paper, refining the image as he went. “An unexpected spark that appears during the process is always better than something arranged beforehand,” he says.
This is a risky way to paint, like opening a blind box in the wild. Without a map, his failure rate is incredibly high. He often ruins a sheet of paper by working over it too many times. Behind every successful, finished piece, there are usually four or five ruined drafts. Yet, he never throws these failures away. He keeps them safe, viewing these heavily layered rejects as a quiet way of storing up creative energy for the next breakthrough.
This rebellious spirit shows in his materials, too.
He loves the soft, warm, and forgiving feel of traditional Chinese Xuan paper. But on top of the fluid ink washes, he aggressively layers ten or more thick coats of acrylic paint and gritty oil pastels. This clash between traditional Eastern roots and heavy Western mediums reflects his own experience of seeing nature and the city constantly intertwine.
For inspiration, Gu Yi looks past classical art history and goes straight to the ancient beginnings: prehistoric rock art from Inner Mongolia, the Liangshan mountains, Spain, and Egypt. Those simple lines left in caves thousands of years ago captured the earliest, most genuine connection between humans and animals. Sometimes, Gu Yi paints mysterious, unidentifiable creatures - because when you paint from the heart, anatomical accuracy no longer matters.
He is also fascinated by street graffiti and children’s drawings. Adult rationality always tries to interfere with the creative instinct, but by working through a dozen layers of paint, Gu Yi is trying to find his way back to that primal wildness - the kind that makes an animal's fur stand on end in the light.
A corner of the GuYi's Studio
Gu Yi is drawing, while a kitten crouches nearby.
Not a Gentle Decoration, But a Low-Frequency Energy Field
Although Gu Yi prefers not to over-analyse his art by tying it too closely to his childhood background, it is hard to deny that his work captures the spirit of our time.
The industrial town of his youth is a microcosm of a global story. In the chaotic expansion of cities, it is not just wild animals that have lost their habitats; humans, too, have lost their spiritual homes within the rigid order of concrete and steel.
For the collectors in the Dotspace community, Gu Yi has a quiet, thoughtful wish:
He hopes that when his paintings enter a tense, efficiency-driven modern urban home, they do not act as polite decorations that simply match the living room sofa. Instead, he wants them to be a "low-frequency, steady energy field." Think of it as a small ecological intruder slipping into a sterile room, quietly opening a window to let a bit of wildness and ease drift in.
It is like those few minutes you might have spent as a child, crouching by a field and staring into space at dusk. None of your modern, adult problems are solved, but in that moment, as the wind blows past, you feel that simply being alive is exactly right.
Click to view Gu Yi's Studio Edition works.