The questions we usually ask about a thing are: "What is it?", "What does it act like?" and "What can it do?" In other words, we always want to know about the nature, the representation and the function of a thing, and about the relationship between these three aspects. Specifically, is there a basic difference between the form and the nature of a thing? Is there a Platonic type of Form? Does the form of a thing represent its nature? Or does the nature of a thing determine its function? Is it a valid dichotomy between the externality and the internality of a thing? Is a thing detached and independent or is there a special relationship between it and man? How does man describe a thing? These are the questions brought up in Guo Gong's works. If there exists a consistent Platonic mode of thinking about things, Guo Gong is giving answers in his own ways. The particular examples are his trees and stainless steels. So different the two of them are: one soft, the other hard; one natural, the other processed; one animate, the other lifeless.

Mostly, perspectivism is Guo Gong's tool to process (interpret) things. He looks at a thing from different perspectives. He deals with and interprets trees in different ways. The tree is an objective being. To Guo Gong, nevertheless, there is no certain nature or knowledge for it. The facets of trees cannot be covered by a single nature or function. Nothing can be fully used. To process and interpret a tree, we can start from its texture and annual rings – reveal its internality and traces of growth by stripping it based on the law of its annual rings; we can also go against the law and give the tree a transverse dissection, making it a tablet that violates the annual growth rings. These are the two ways to anatomize a tree. Still, we can rearrange it by working on its shape, roots, branches and sense of form, grafting it onto another tree or some other branches and leaves onto it so as to make it a visual object; the tree's functions can also be taken as an entrance for interpretation, like its architectural, mechanical and furnishing functions. Furthermore, its life, death and transfer in time and space (from a tree in the earth to a crossbeam of a building, then torn down and sent to the artist's studio) can also help identify them. Guo Gong shows both the internality and the externality of a tree, the two of which, however, doesn't agree with the tree's nature and appearance or representation. The internality could be a kind of representation (just look at those curvy tracks of the annual rings!), and also the externality is unnecessarily not a nature. But, even to present a tree's internality, he has different ways: anatomizing the whole tree (dissecting the trunk along the annual rings), or stripping a part (the trunk) of the tree repeatedly – peeling the bark layer by layer but, instead of separating the layers, keeping them linked at every juncture and hanging by the trunk all the way down to the ground. A part of the rectangular trunk is peeled and turned into a soft suspended rectangle, while its roots and branches remain unchanged, so the tree ends up a unique structure, a heterogeneous tree spectacle. This is a tree, but now a heterogeneous collage tree. It is a separate totality, the totality where the tree's externality and the internality are juxtaposed and presented together, and the totality where artificialness and naturalness are interwoven. Thus, Guo Gong has unlocked the various development potential for a tree, allowing it to unfold, change and develop in various directions, forms and areas.

This is telling us that trees can be both everyday tools for farmers and objects of appreciation for scholars and nobles, both plants that grow in their own special ways and even means to represent and simulate other things (Guo Gong simulates reinforced steel bars with rosewood branches, making an elegant dance of lines and a game of lines as if out of classical Chinese painting). Therefore, the placements of a tree into the different relations realizes its functions and also properties: it is life, landscape, aesthetics, architecture, a scientific object that invites careful studies… Then, how can we ascertain the nature and knowledge of a tree (or another ordinary thing) here? Is there a certain nature or a certain type of knowledge for anything? Or do all things have a common nature? Apparently, nothing can be fully used. There are a variety of functions and forms for a single thing, and each function matches a particular form, which perhaps helps settle every nature of it. Form, function and nature are all particular, including every relevant element, so a thing is a combination of various particularities, not an assembly of abstractions. It's not like a Platonic combination where a particular form or function has to abide by a universal Form. On the contrary, everything has multiple properties, each of which matches a particular form and function. For these three elements, no change of one comes without altering the other two. Everything here shows its different forms, functions and natures, and no ultimate universal nature exists. No single form, function or nature can determine and cover the fundamental characteristic of a thing. He works on stainless steel in the same way: first, overlapping, and then grinding the whole into the form of a mirror where people can see themselves funnily before and see a rock from behind. He always invents a new function, trait and a form never existed before for a thing – there are so much potential in a thing's form. He has even invented a black lampshade and presented the infinite blue sky in a definite jar… Sometimes these forms and functions are part of a natural course, and sometimes against the natural law, but they are by no means people's conventional ways of using things. What he's aiming at or arguing refute happens to be people's usual imaginations and uses of things. Guo Gong diverts things into a direction that has never been explored or stepped into by anyone, and that whose paths are unknown even to the things themselves. So the things are liberated from the conventional patterns and people's fixed myths and imaginations of them. These things start to become out of recognition, or in other words, things are not supposed to have specific appearances.

Then what does it mean? In fact, there's no limit to things' functions or forms, because no definite nature can be found. The function and trait of a thing resides not in itself but in its relationships with man and other things. It can only be defined in relations that are different from each other and change all the time. Guo Gong has shown us a few relations between trees and man – man links with trees in various ways. These obviously are only a small part of all the relations – we can still imagine Guo Gong's other attempts to work on trees. With its own uniqueness, every relation between a thing and man determines the thing's function and nature. Therefore, it is not that there's only one nature for all things, but rather that things possess a variety of natures. It is such variety that drives concepts like the nature of a thing to explode and be nullified, or we can even say that the part of metaphysics based on the concept of one unique nature should also explode and be nullified.

Relations are whimsical, temporary and occasional. Whitehead even believed that relations can happen in all levels and sizes, which means that there may be countless relations between a thing and someone or something else. The thing is surrounded by multifarious relations, and among them, those that between man and things are not the most authoritative ones, as man's perception of a tree is only different from a tree's perception of another tree to certain degrees – they are equal relations. Can we determine which way Guo Gong deals with trees is the most ultimate or authoritative? Moreover, the relation between man and a thing is sometimes interwoven with that between two different things, and a thing's perception of another is married with man's perception of the thing, so we are looking at the marriage and entanglement of multiple relations. They must find satisfaction from different relations and obtain different satisfactory relations. When working on or interpreting a thing, Guo Gong is certain to gain satisfaction – this is the basic reason for the interpretation of things – without such satisfaction, there won't be the last treatment or interpretation of the thing.

Just because of this, because satisfaction is the end, or the knowledge of things is always subject to satisfaction, we can say that this is a Nietzschean type of knowledge of happiness. We can imagine that Guo Gong must have been filled with joys when exploring the inside of a thing in his studio with all his tools (most of which must be cutters). It's such joys that allow him to find all the peculiar possibilities of a thing, his various relations with a thing and the extraordinary relations between one thing and another. No relation, however, is most authoritative; and no relation alone can exhaust the entire meanings of a thing. Every relation can only be partial: "The nature of a thing will never be fully shown in any relation or interaction with it." Nothing can be exhausted by a single definition or relation, or by some force of mankind. In fact, Guo Gong has demonstrated various potent ways of using and interpreting trees – every time it turns out to be a happy satisfaction. The more the ways of using a thing, the more the satisfaction, the broader the definition and knowledge of a thing and the less possible the attempt to define it once and for all. If Chu Hsi has really left us a different understanding of studying the nature of things, we have to add that different ways of studying will lead to different knowledge, or in other words, you'll discover new knowledge every time. New life will be given to the thing every time, and it'll be a new process of production every time. Thus, there's no ultimate or absolute knowledge of a thing. Things are strongly against the pursuit of ultimate knowledge. In this sense, there's always a limitation to the investigation of things. Since the investigation is infinite, the joy of life also becomes infinite.