Inside the Art, Outside Ourselves is a series of workshops that each invite you to spend time reflecting on a specific artwork from our main exhibition, Celestial Bodies, curated by Neena Wang. Through guiding prompts and conversation, we encourage you to dig deeper into the work, think meaningfully about the ideas presented, and to respond with drawing or writing exercises. Artists to be featured include Marina Peng, Yiran Guo, and In Kyoung Chun.
This month, we’ll be looking at Yiran Guo’s work, Smells, and talking about Traditional Chinese Medicine.
“Smells is a long-format mono print on rice paper, created as part of the animation project 像 (Xiàng). It incorporates lithographs of drawings based on found images from Chinese medical books, featuring depictions of mouths and children afflicted with various diseases, layered with dry herbs on top.”
Yiran Guo (郭逸然) lives and works in Shanghai and New York. Her work ranges across experimental animation, printing, painting and ceramics. Recent residencies include the EFA Robert Blackburn Printmaking Workshop, EFA North Fork and SVA Riso Lab. Her experimental animation has been screened in film festivals around the world, and her self-published artist book *Höuse* is held in the New York Public Library. She has an MFA from Maryland Institute College of Art and has taught at Johns Hopkins University.
“I am an artist working between analogue and digital forms, with a practice that spans painting, ceramic making, and moving images. Interested in the connection between nostalgia and the uncanny, my works often twist familiar figures and scenes to provoke unsettling feelings. My recent work has involved collecting and repurposing archival images into collages using animation, print and painting. My presented project 像 (Xiàng) is an experimental stop-motion animation, loosely related to cross-generational memories and the passing of time, and informed by my research on mask dances from Tibetan Buddhism and traditional medical books from ancient China. The animation is also inspired by stories from Daoism which take up the themes of transcending boundaries, spirit journeying, and acceptance of the vicissitudes of life. The animation is part of a larger project, which also includes a series of Risograph prints. While the prints are based on images from the animation, especially the repeating faces of characters, they have been repeatedly manipulated to creative distinctive standalone works. Each print is unique, but they share repeating motifs, in ways that blur memory and the present, and suggest a porous border between reality and dreams.“