Solo show
27th March - 23th May 2025
S1: ex Lanificio - scala b, piano I - Piazza Enrico De Nicola 46, Naples Italy
Dissolving Boundaries, the title of the show, draws inspiration freely from the Neapolitan novels by Elena Ferrante, particularly the theme of “smarginatura” – a dissolution of identity, where reality, self-perception, and societal structures blur and disintegrate. This notion of instability is central to Guo’s practice; exploring transformation, gender, and impermanence, highlighting the fluidity of form and meaning. Embodiment of change, while floral and skeletal elements symbolize ephemerality and resilience, emphasizing the interplay of life and death.
For the development of the current exhibition, Yage Guo was also immersed in texts and literature such as: Philippa Gregory’s Plantagenet and Tudor Novels, Quaderno Proibito by Alba de Céspedes, Stone Butch Blues by Leslie Feinberg or Detransition, Baby by Torrey Peters. These works examine women and queer individuals navigating identity, independence, and self-definition. They challenge rigid societal norms of womanhood, motherhood, and love, portraying femininity as a fluid, contradictory concept that coexists with masculinity, embodying both harmony and chaos.
In Study of Judith with the Head of Holofernes, she’s reimagining Judith as androgynous – defiant, self-possessed, and unwavering – stripping away the traditional depictions of seduction. The Medusa portrayal challenges the conventional narrative. She is often painted in defeat – her severed head held as a war trophy, grotesque and monstrous. The artist wanted to depict a Medusa who, though vanquished, remains eternal, ambiguous, seductive, and poised for vengeance.
Mythology, much like identity, is fluid and ever-changing. It is inherited, reinterpreted, and molded by the passage of time. I am drawn to these spaces of uncertainty – seeking to fill them with my own interpretations and alterations.
Yage Guo’s Skeleton Series explores materiality, color, and transformation, drawing inspiration from personal loss and the cremation process. This transition from flesh to bone reveals the history within bone white, while the skull and its subtle smile symbolize the return to one’s essential form. In exploring emotional weight through color, various hues represent different themes: deep blues reflect quiet meditation on death and rebirth; purples embody desire; greens reflect eerie stillness and untamed vitality; yellows radiate warmth and the act of waiting; reds reflect pulse with sensuality and intensity. The theme of imaginative narratives, influenced by astrology and tarot, the artist uses these metaphors to translate abstract qualities into vivid imagery.
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This approach leads to imaginative reincarnations of figures from literature and history, such as Marguerite d’Anjou (Margaret of Anjou was Queen of England by marriage to King Henry VI from 1445 to 1461 and again from 1470 to 1471) as The Chariot card or a blindfolded centaur representing Sagittarius.
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In her four expansive paintings, Guo explores moments of transformation, when identity dissolves and reforms: Veil of Spring symbolizes renewal and memory – a bold flower emerging, only to dissolve back into petals and time – echoing the desire to affirm one’s existence. Reverie embodies departure and disintegration. Unraveling illustrates the fluid coexistence of life and death – an orchid blooming while a dissolving body morphs into bone. Liminal Dance portrays a woman in blue, dancing through empty space – moving between pain and joy, life and death, caught in an eternal cycle of transition.
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Words by Vincent Vanden Bogaard
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Debut solo show
9th November 2023 - 18th January 2024
PM/AM Gallery, 37 Eastcastle Street, London, W1W 8DR
In the tapestry of fate a glimmer beckoned in the shadows, a sword ablaze with icy light. With a whispering breeze the young androgyne approached, aflame with purpose, and grasped the blade. "A knight", it whispered, as if destiny's decree. With fiery zeal they stood, their spirit soaring, envisioning the blade's triumph over darkness. Time, that silent navigator of destiny's tides, revealed the weight of the sword, the armour melded to his life. "Knight" became their essence. When the wind rose, the young knight would recall the ethereal dream, their spirit untethered, their form liberated from the weight of armour, fleeting and free once more. Yet in their life, unbeknownst to them, fate had silently etched its toll into every choice. - Yage Guo
The Sword suite in tarot links to thought, intellect, beliefs, attitudes, and consciousness, aligning with the elusive element of air and embodying an unseen yet forceful, masculine energy. Yage's inspiration is rooted in the essence of the Swords, her engagement weaving itself into the exhibition's construction. As A.E. Waite once said, "The true tarot is symbolism; it speaks no other language and offers no other signs."
Within these paintings Yage sketches the young androgynous knight from her written prologue, presenting a series of narratives that symbolically depict a person's connection with the self, objects, and the external world. The knight's story opens contemplation on themes of individualism, romanticism and queerness. The show is grouped into three sections: The Beginning, The Present, and The Future, each embodied by one of three flower paintings. Chrysanthemum Dreams, an inception akin to Lin Daiyu's prophecy in the Chinese novel Dream of the Red Chamber, foretells an allegory of one's own fantastical emotions, steeped in prophetic echoes. The Striped Carnation marks the present, a juncture to gaze back upon, an ode to an anonymous love tale. The Fig symbolises the obscured future, distinct from other blossoms, hinting at maturity.
Across this body of work various elements move in and out of focus - objects of importance, characters, locations that could represent psychological states as much as geographical places. Aligning these is a notion of human transformation, of the body and the spirit. In the work The Performance of A Knight, a figure emerges, their identity and basic personal narrative held at a distance. When embodying a role an individual's persona becomes fragmented, their portrayal of a character shaped by societal empowerment and definition.
The numerous layers of Yage’s work are abounded here. The young figure is fragile yet passionate. They are adorned with symbols of power and perseverance: armour for protection, a sword for assertion, further unveiling a corner of Yage’s imaginative world. We can lean into the framework of this mythical person to recall our own life experiences, and those of others. We too face challenges, we too waved the sword to cut off the thorns. Overcoming them is adaptation, growth and understanding the hardships that this entails - for muscle to build it first has to break.
The figure contemplating this is of non-binary gender, and their armour is reconstructed with the features of ancient male and female armour designs. It appears flowing, its metallic undulation akin to a dress caught in a strong breeze. The ambiguity of the androgynous figure aligns with Yage's aesthetic preferences, drawing from her fascination for 80s and 90s Japanese Shojo manga. The artwork challenges the patriarchal gaze on gender classification, inviting a fantastical embrace of the notions of "femininity" and "masculinity".
Fantasy bridges the historical to now, to the modern day. Recognising the visual tropes of history within the increasing complications of life in the present, Yage works across these interlocking territories, bringing the ageless symbols of one into the fervent contemporaneity of another. An hourglass appears to depict the passage or perhaps this blending of time. In the blue tranquil space of Contemplation we witness a solitary youth caught in a calm, inward observation under the moon, surrounded by morning glories. Vines weave their way out of an arched structure towards the sky, an emancipation. This is a solitary moment of self-reflection and significant self-transition. The show finishes with empty armour left in the grip of vines, the young knight departed from their present role, perhaps towards an ultimate destiny.
From youth to adulthood, we transform. From vulnerable children we become towering, intelligent adults, collecting experiences and overcoming obstacles. Our sense of self multiplies, the spiritual and astral counterparts activating themselves. What centrally characterises Yage’s paintings is an honest depiction of the sentiments and experiences of these developments, their contrasting moments of fear and doubt; of euphoria and exultation.
Text written by Daniel Mackenzie
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Duo exhibition between Yage Guo & Bo Sun
​27th April - 27th May 2023
Sherbet Green Gallery, Unit 1, 2 Treadway Street, London, E2 6QW
Biomorphic forms and petals catching first light. The work of Bo Sun and Yage Guo meets at the point of the natural sublime; a symbolic reckoning at the moment of confrontation between humans and all other nature. While Guo wields linen-cradled flora set in the soft exposure of the atmosphere’s imposing light, Sun constructs techno-futurist skeletons, clad with bluebells and pastel-coloured plastics evoking gelatinous flesh. The works metamorphose from prehistoric, to post-anthropogenic, to supernatural, articulating a reflection on and reverence for structural design in nature and across industry.
Guo observes flowers and plants as subjects, reforming them through a sentimental process of transformation, often using this repeated process as a way to bridge the gap between urban existence and nonhuman nature. Sun’s process is colder, more mechanical. He appropriates shapes such as the moth, cutting them into perspex and aluminium to exact a kind of invasion; a type of mark making that inserts biological patterns into structural engineering and robotics. The sharp edges of Sun’s forms, often evoking mirrored or concrete architectural cityscapes, contrast the breathtaking, fleeting instances that inspire Guo, exacting a play of hard and soft that moves in the philosophical space between the earthly and the cosmological; between day and night.
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