"Back" Doris Guo Solo ExhibitionEmpty Gallery
Empty Gallery is pleased to present Back, Oslo-based artist Doris Guo’s first solo exhibition in Asia. Existing in the interstices between embodied duration and affective labor, Guo’s practice often coalesces around the cultural and material gestures which structure our attempts to form a communal life.
Back centers around a collaborative project of material care which Guo and her mother, Weili Wang, have undertaken to organize and conserve the latter’s artwork. Formerly lodged undisturbed around her Seattle home, Wang’s oil paintings and sketches—mostly executed between 1980 and 1990 around the Yangtze River Delta—bear witness to an artistic life partially abridged by circumstance. Presented as diptychs together with Guo’s pinhole photographs depicting the suburban interior of Wang’s study—replete with cardboard boxes, filing folders, and other marginalia—they constitute a highly personal form of evidence, speaking to the paradoxical manner in which physical or geographical proximity can amplify distance, and separation can foster feelings of closeness. The familiar, but rarely remarked upon intertwining between intimacy and anomie. This body of work is accompanied by a suite of new projector sculptures in which found objects are enlarged and transmuted, the quietly domestic assuming the charged contours and haunting proportions of memory.