Guo Fengyi’s large-scale drawings are a form of cosmic tribute to a way of living that is becoming increasingly lost to the modern world. Animated by denizens that are part human and part spirit, her works possess a dynamic energy that echoes the huge amount of gestural repetition that goes into the creation of each work. A tendency that is becoming more pronounced in Guo’s recent work is her use of a single vertical scroll to depict a larger-than-life character -- even though that character is sometimes seen as two parts, one of which is viewed upright, while the other (which might be the same character viewed from a distinct angle) remains upside down.

Guo does not so much represent the human form as she burrows for it, conjures it up, and then creates an extremely stylized shape that may or may not possess limbs or a trunk, but nonetheless conveys a very specific energy and temperament, not unlike a portrait. People’s corporal vessels do not seem to interest her nearly as much as the energy that each of us projects out into the world, and Guo’s most engrossing works communicate the belief that if you can use of art to capture that invisible force, then the physical details will take care of themselves.

Probably the single most noteworthy formal aspect of Guo’s work is her ability to create luminous waves of light and color that envelop her subjects in a golden halo. Such radiance affirms the artist’s strong predilection for using art to bring the unknown and the invisible into being, since even that which our sense organs cannot perceive directly can be detected nonetheless, through disruptions in the energy fields through which it passes.

For Taipei, the artist has chosen to depict places and entities that she has never seen directly, but which she has nonetheless turned into images by using her creativity to ‘see’ them. She will also be presenting a number of smaller works from a decade ago and more, to contextualize her current work in a way that demonstrates her artistic growth, from an intriguing outsider to one of China’s most exemplary practitioners in a traditional medium.