余果：风景那边独“好” | 梯·间影像项目第三回

YuGuo: The “Good” Landscape Lies Over There

The third edition of LongSpace’s Stairway Video Project will present eight works by artist Yu Guo, ranging from early video pieces involving performative bodily actions to his later “essay films” constructed through CG animation and AI-generated inserted imagery. These works offer viewers a comprehensive look at the artist’s prolific exploration in the field of moving image over the past decade.

Yu Guo’s video practice began with pieces featuring physical intervention, bordering on post-conceptual performance documentation. Chongqing: Nameless Mountain, I Am a Tank, and Red Line, created between 2011 and 2013, are not thematically connected, yet they all exude a raw hormonal energy—an intense outpouring of bodily reactions and creative impulse. For the artist, the primary subjectivity does not lie in discourse, but in the real confrontation with space and environment. When such confrontations take on value within artistic creation without deliberate justification, it is serendipitous and rare.

▲重庆无名山（Chongqing Mountains）

单通道高清数字录像，Single-channel，1080p，Digital video，00:06:54, 2011， © 余果

▲红线（Red line）

单通道高清数字录像，Single-channel，1080p， Digital video ，00:04:40, 2013，©余果

In Chongqing: Nameless Mountain, a shortwave radio receiving old broadcasts evokes the closed-off era before the 1970s. The secretive indoor act of listening to “enemy channels” is relocated to a mountainside in Chongqing; the radio, a technological relic, wanders through the terrain as the artist oscillates between seeking connection with the outside world and creating obstacles. In I Am a Tank, the treadmill serves as a humorous metaphor for a tank—the body “confined” yet desperately running toward an unreachable target (a toy helicopter). The fire the artist spits becomes a dynamic metaphor for artillery. The helicopter’s chaotic flight within the cramped indoor space seems to mock the artist’s futile aggression. Eventually, in frustration, he lifts a torch and knocks it down; the attempt to “shoot it down” with fire ends in failure. In Red Line, the tool in use is a laser level—common to both the artist and construction workers. Mimicking a laborer, the artist repeatedly strikes the floor with a sledgehammer; with each blow, the trembling device shifts its laser line. Undoubtedly, force can shift boundaries. Yet what of the barbaric outcome? Since the action takes place inside a building awaiting demolition, viewers naturally imagine the rest.

▲我是坦克（I am a tank）

单通道高清数字录像，Single-channel，1080p，Digital video，00:01:38, 2012，©余果

Another pair of works—Floating Land (2018) and Boundary Sphere (2019)—marks a fundamental change in Yu Guo’s creative approach. Constructing discourse becomes a driving method within his moving-image practice. Departing from traditional video art, computer programs replace earlier props such as radios, treadmills, toy helicopters, and laser levels. On one hand, this reflects the evolution of artistic tools; on the other, it signals the end of his childhood migration experience with his parents. Settling in Chongqing as the center point, he travels outward to various geographical locations, conducting field research through the camera.

▲浮动的土地（Floating Land）

单通道数字录像，Single-channel，1080p Digital video，00:10:45, 2018， © 余果

▲结界（Jiéjiè）
单通道高清数字录像，Single-channel，1080p，Digital video，00:12:57，2019， © 余果

Beyond technique, both works introduce a shared element — hallucination. Floating Land begins from a rippling water surface at a low angle, offering a visual experience familiar only to those who have lived in a mountainous city like Chongqing: layers of ground, infrastructure, and high-rise buildings stacked vertically. Such a rapidly constructed megacity induces the illusion that the land is floating—an expression of psychological crisis. Yu Guo avoids highlighting the local geographical specificity to extend the concept toward the universal wounds of contemporary cities. Land is not born of the Earth’s core, yet it remains the foundation of all things.Boundary Sphere, created after Yu Guo studied CG animation, projects his individual psychological crisis into a new symbolic system. When a digital panoramic plane can be “reflected” onto a mirrored sphere, the result is purely computational — a “object” presented within a curved dimension. Unlike the physical world, multiple viewpoints allow us to see the entire “object” enclosed in the spherical “barrier” simultaneously. From a panoramic digital plane to a virtual spherical surface, our optical logic nevertheless returns to the real plane—the two-dimensional screen image. Meanwhile, our neural pathways, shaped by digital experiences, adapt to this “reality.” Yu Guo believes that people too are trapped within a kind of “boundary”— a spherical gaseous enclosure—while the body is continually reshaped by technological mediation.

▲给一位影像工作者的风水指南（Feng Shui Guide）

The nameless mountain in Yu Guo’s earliest work opened the spatial trajectory of his practice. The mountain motif appears repeatedly, and the transition from mountain to ocean retraces the migration path of his childhood. Eccentric Circles and Tidal Lines (2025) also adopts a folding strategy: one half concerns oceanic tidal boundaries, while the other depicts circular communal buildings shot from above. Moving between real footage and animation, color blocks construct the “ocean” and the “enclosed dwellings”—the former freely pulled and stretched, the latter arbitrarily traversed. Perhaps this is the migratory route of birds, or perhaps it is the simultaneous movement of the artist’s discourse.

▲离心圆与潮线

In Yu Guo’s vocabulary, he seldom mentions the word “landscape.” Instead, he speaks of geography and space. Growing up in a mountainous region, he did not develop the urban sentimentality that treats natural scenery as an aesthetic object for emotional projection. He prefers situating himself within various geographical spaces, focusing on the people and events that occur there. In the preface to the reprint of Landscape and Power, editor W. J. T. Mitchell provides insightful reflections on “space, place, and landscape,” noting that they form a dialectical triad: place as a specific site; space as a “practiced place,” activated by action, activity, and symbols; and landscape as place viewed as image or “scene.” Through this framework, we may better understand Yu Guo’s work: he sets aside “scenery” and instead focuses on space and place, extracting discourse and narrative from within.

The famous line by a great leader — “the scenery here is uniquely fine”—refers to the space he occupied: the practiced place of a Red Army base area. In Yu Guo’s video works, what appears more often is the other side of the landscape, or foreign terrain. For example, Division and Suture (2024) situates itself in North Korea, where a dilapidated socialist frontier of “version 1.0” is gazed upon by the memory of a “version 3.0” socialist utopia. Tracing the past of this utopian vision, the artist discovers an abandoned film-screening room of the old Changchun Film Studio in a forest cabin and reflects on its history. In the end, the forests of Changbai Mountain are replaced by AI-generated uncanny images—neither space, nor place, nor landscape, but a digital heterotopia.

Exhibition | Guangzhou LongSpace
2025.12.17-2026.2.23