{"id":2621,"date":"2026-06-14T08:58:17","date_gmt":"2026-06-14T08:58:17","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/longartspace.com\/?p=2621"},"modified":"2026-06-24T09:23:00","modified_gmt":"2026-06-24T09:23:00","slug":"%e5%af%b9%e8%b0%88%ef%bd%9c%e4%bd%99%e6%9e%9c%ef%bc%9a%e5%87%ba%e6%88%8f%e6%84%8f%e5%91%b3%e7%9d%80%e8%a7%82%e7%9c%8b%e8%80%85%e8%83%bd%e6%98%8e%e7%99%bd%e8%af%9d%e8%af%ad%e7%9a%84","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/longartspace.com\/en\/%e5%af%b9%e8%b0%88%ef%bd%9c%e4%bd%99%e6%9e%9c%ef%bc%9a%e5%87%ba%e6%88%8f%e6%84%8f%e5%91%b3%e7%9d%80%e8%a7%82%e7%9c%8b%e8%80%85%e8%83%bd%e6%98%8e%e7%99%bd%e8%af%9d%e8%af%ad%e7%9a%84\/","title":{"rendered":"Dialogue | Yu Guo: \"'Breaking the Fourth Wall' Means the Viewer Can Recognize the Shift in Register\""},"content":{"rendered":"
\n\t\t\t\t
\n\t\t\t\t\t
\n\t\t\t\t
\n\t\t\t\t
\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t
\"\"<\/figure>\n

<\/p>\n

Location: LongSpace<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Date: January 16, 2026<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Jiang Meng: I recently went through Yu Guo's work from the past sixteen years. I'm very interested in the development of an artist's overall aesthetic, and I'd like to start by tracing that arc before landing on the two works we just saw. Those who are familiar with Yu Guo often mention a striking shift in your practice: in your early video works, the physical presence of your body is very pronounced.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

In those earlier works, made roughly before 2017 and 2018, the earliest of which I encountered dates to 2009, such as Unnamed Mountain in Chongqing shown in the stairwell, the direct bodily presence of the artist brings the work closer to the territory of performance art. But from around 2017 and 2018 onward, voiceover gradually entered your work, mostly delivered in your own voice, while the frequency of your body appearing in front of the camera noticeably decreased. I'm quite curious: what prompted this fairly significant shift?<\/p>\n

\"\u56fe\u7247\"<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Chongqing Mountains 2011<\/strong><\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Single -channel 1080p Digital video\uff0c00:06:54<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Carrying a radio into the mountains on the outskirts of Chongqing, listening to shortwave channels (local Chongqing broadcasts). A day of walking alone, accompanied by the static that follows when the signal disappears.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Yu Guo: Yes, from 2017 onward, with the work Telephoto Cameraman, voiceover suddenly appeared, whereas earlier work was more readily associated with performance video. It was indeed a turning point. But \"bodiliness\" has always been a central force in my practice, something like an engine. I just intentionally moved the body behind the screen, emphasizing embodied looking, the body moving through geographical space, and so on, even if my own physical image no longer appeared directly on screen as it did in the early work. I actually feel that withdrawing behind the camera allows \"bodiliness\" to become even more of a fulcrum for the work.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

At the time, my starting point was never really performance video. I was more interested in media. Many early works, like Unnamed Mountain in Chongqing, Red Line, Park, and Steadicam, all dealt with the relationship between the body and media. It just so happened that \"body\" was more easily recognizable to the art world then. So my choice to add voiceover in 2017 actually came from a kind of passive urgency. I noticed that discussions and understandings of my work were always grounded in some preexisting contextual framework, while what I actually wanted to express and discuss had no ready-made context. Adding voiceover was a choice made out of necessity. At the time I still felt that \"speaking\" was not a particularly elevated form of artistic expression, but I had no other option. By 2017 I had become very clearly aware that, compared to exhibition opportunities where work could be seen, what was even more lacking was a context for understanding and discussing the work.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/figure>\n

<\/p>\n

Red Line 2013<\/strong><\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Single-channel 1080p digital video<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Placing a laser level on the floor of a building scheduled for demolition, then repeatedly striking the floor with a hammer to make the red line vibrate and shift. At night, holding the level and projecting the red line onto the outer walls of buildings, walking around the entire demolition zone.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Jiang Meng: I've been thinking about this too. There's a very visible change in how your work relates to existing, recognizable contemporary art contexts. Over these past fifteen or so years, the contemporary art context itself has undergone enormous transformation. I'd like to return to that question when we get to the more recent work, to discuss the relationship between work and its context.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

As for your understanding of the body: I've actually been developing some new thinking about the body recently. I have an intuitive sense that the body is increasingly treated as a site for producing \"the real\" or \"knowledge.\" Especially during periods of intense social upheaval or crisis, the body tends to be seen as a more reliable source of knowledge. Post-war Japan, for instance, produced a great deal of body-oriented cinema and literature. More directly relevant to us is Chinese performance art of the 1980s and 90s. Looking back at that lineage now, you can see a great deal of romanticization of the body. On the surface it appears to be a decontextualized, neutral presence, but in practice that romanticization often harbors an idealization of a so-called \"raw\" or \"primitive\" state. In the contemporary moment especially, I sometimes feel that when a creator's understanding and engagement haven't gone deep enough, the body is easily deployed as a habitual symbol or cover. So I've wondered whether your shift in practice is also connected to this lineage: a deliberate distancing from that kind of conventionalized, symbolized use of the body?<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Yu Guo: That problem does exist. Contemporary art has a long history of being fascinated by the body, and has built up a set of contexts for how bodies are used and looked at within the contemporary art system. In the dynamic process of development, this naturally produces a kind of paradox at a certain stage. On the one hand, people endow the body with qualities of chaos, sensory immediacy, and unruly wildness; on the other hand, they continue to look at and appreciate \"body\" through an entirely habitual mode of thinking. And many works rely heavily on the contemporary art context to confer meaning. The trouble is that these contexts have become deeply habitual and rigid. So the shift in my work was indeed connected to this lineage. I didn't want to make work that looked particularly \"good\" or \"clever\" within an existing context, because during that period I felt such practice had already become largely meaningless.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Jiang Meng: After really entering into the rhythm of the voiceover and narration in your work, I began to feel that your body actually hasn't been absent at all. Across all your video works, I can identify, to varying degrees, three dimensions, and the body seems to be the most fundamental layer among them, or the mode through which they are held together.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

One line left a strong impression on me, from Watershed: \"To form a memory of topography, different perspectives need to be layered over one another to achieve a comprehensive grasp of space and time.\" That comprehensive grasp is anchored through bodily sensation. I want to use three pairs of terms to outline these dimensions: first, geology, topography, geography; second, media, technology, image; third, discourse, rhetoric, narrative. Essentially every work unfolds across these three, with different weightings at different times, but they are consistently connected through the mode of bodily perception.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

I'd like to ask one question for each dimension in turn, and then open things up to the audience.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

So, starting with the first dimension: geology, topography, geography. The ordering here actually traces a movement from the natural to the cultural, from the material to the discursive. Geology tends toward materiality; topography involves human perception and naming of the earth's surface; geography already belongs to the domain of cultural production. Your attention to materiality surprised and delighted me. Especially in Yangjiao Town, the way you handle the materiality of the gravel and river stones is striking. Many artists in contemporary art deconstruct the politics of images, but your approach, allowing material itself to function as a silent, witnessing natural presence that bears the assembly and disintegration of various discourses across its surface, is something I find rare. Later, in Mountains, the sustained gaze on the raw earth of Xinjiang continues a similar perspective and path. And this leads back to what you mentioned: you're from Chongqing, and the body's relationship to mountainous terrain is the starting point of your practice. That attention gradually extended to land itself, and from there to land policy, urban development, rural construction, and larger questions. Then through residencies in different places, Wuhan, the Altai Mountains, and as in the work we saw today, the China-North Korea border, you offer particularly interesting observations and interactions.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

So I'm curious: how do you typically build a creative connection with a place? Is there a relatively stable working method that has gradually taken shape? Have you ever encountered a situation where you arrived at a residency or location wanting to begin making work but found it genuinely difficult to enter?<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/figure>\n

<\/p>\n

Watershed 2024<\/strong><\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Three-channel 4K digital video<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

\"Watershed\" is a geographical term that people habitually use as a metaphor for a turning point in the development of things. The ancient road from Chongqing to Guizhou historically passed through a place called Watershed.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

This is a road between places. The artist walked along this ancient route, not as a way of investigating historical threads, but borrowing the path to link different locations together. By walking forward while looking back at the road already traveled, the artist gradually finds the overlapping points between different \"roads,\" constructing a geographical stratigraphy through image and narration.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/figure>\n

<\/p>\n

Mountains 2023<\/strong><\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Single-channel 4K digital video<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

In the Chinese-language context, how do people use language to construct and shape the frontier? Carrying this question, the artist walked between the Altai Mountains, the Tianshan Mountains, and the Kunlun Mountains, producing an essay film from two different angles: geography and documentary sources.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Yu Guo: Different places have their own particularities, and my work also sets different phased objectives. So I don't choose to refine a fixed working method and then apply it to different locations. But the three dimensions you describe exist everywhere: geography, media, discourse are all universal questions. So what I care about deeply is: what kind of structural relationship will these dimensions form in any given place? My work adjusts its working method according to those structural relationships. Yangjiao Town, for instance, focuses on the relationship between geology and landscape, because it is fundamentally a production of space within a natural scenic area, while emphasizing in its discourse and narrative the tension between discourses pulling against each other, and the act of looking from different positions at different elevations of the mountain, all of which relate to its actual reality. In Mountains, by contrast, I deliberately eliminated expression of my own bodily perception, and instead placed two very differently dimensioned objects of inquiry on the same plane: actual geographical space and Chinese-language documentary sources.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Although I believe different places have their own particularities, I also believe all different places share common universal questions. That's why I enjoy working with concepts like \"geography\": even though different places are entirely unlike each other, a high mountain versus a flat plain, the reason for that difference comes from the same tectonic movements. Entering these different places, the points of engagement and working methods may vary, but all involve these same universal dimensions. So at that level, working methods do accumulate. It's not a matter of firing a shot and moving on.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Jiang Meng: When you face the dimension of geology, topography, and geography, your practice doesn't simply treat them as conventional subjects of investigation or themes. We discussed earlier the distinction between your work and research-based art. In my view, there's one very clear difference: in much research-based art, the researcher and the researched are typically placed in two relatively stable positions with a clear subject-object division. But in your work, the observer, or researcher, doesn't occupy such a stable or secure position.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

What left a strong impression on me was a moment in Mountains where you say in the voiceover that you gradually came to understand why Han people so often describe ethnic minorities by saying they \"love to sing and dance\": it actually stems from the Han person's own bodily restraint and poverty of language, their inability to use the body to express the relationship between themselves and a wider space. I think this is a strong example. It shows that in the process of engaging with and being in dialogue with an object of attention, you are in fact continually returning to a kind of reflexivity, a dismantling of the self. This is not a stable position of observation, and I think that matters enormously.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Yu Guo: Yes. If my work involves entering a concrete geographical space to analyze the connections between its different dimensions, in order to understand a complex reality, then the act of observation itself cannot be static, nor can it be a subject looking at an object. It's more like a mountain path: you yourself have to walk into it, and you need to recognize your own limitations.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

But you raised the distinction from research-based art, and I'd like to take the opportunity to add something. I don't want to define what research-based art is, because it's hard to define accurately and there's no need. But we can simply ask: where does what the art world today calls research-based art actually come from? Is it an artist's conscious methodological renewal? Or is it the art institution's own mode of production? I would say the latter. Typical research-based art is usually commissioned by museums or biennials, or produced through grant application processes. It's generated by circulating topics within the art context, distributed through the resource allocation of art institutions. In that sense, my work is definitely not research-based art. It might even be its opposite.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Jiang Meng: Yes, and this way of working also involves a vigilance against one's own habits. Which leads to another distinction from research-based art: in much research-based art, the tools of research, like language and image, tend to be treated as neutral or transparent. This transitions naturally to the second dimension: media, technology, and image.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Your sensitivity to media is already apparent in your 2017 work Telephoto Cameraman, also the first work to introduce your own voiced narration. You stood several kilometers away, filming with maximum zoom, and the voiceover notes that \"the relationship between subject and object is actually quite fragile.\" This distance between subject and object has repeatedly become a subject of thought in your practice. In the work we saw today, you continue to observe life on the North Korean side through a telephoto lens, as if extending and elaborating that method from years before.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Media studies has by now substantially expanded its definition of \"media.\" Today \"media\" can refer to almost anything that stands in between, in the sense of medium or middle. Everything in an intermediate state can be understood as media. In your work, the telephoto lens makes visible the refracted light in the air, and this attention to the medium itself reveals a more microscopic, more fundamental kind of power.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

At the same time, this makes me think of a problem within media studies itself: it can sometimes form a closed logical loop. When everything is defined as \"media,\" it seems as though the discursive space for talking about the direct interaction between two subjects disappears. What's interesting is that while you continue to attend to media, beginning with Mountain Road, your images frequently include spontaneous, improvised encounters with strangers, moments entirely outside your control over the image. I love these moments very much: in A Feng Shui Guide for an Image Worker, you chance upon an elderly man living in an abandoned cinema; in Mountains, the improvised exchange with Kazakh children; in Split and Suture, the conversation near the Changchun Film Studio with a farmer at work in the fields. That moment made me realize that a history of film production that seems to have passed is actually still in living contact with the present. History hasn't ended. It's still alive. The intimacy that flashes through these chance encounters left a very strong impression on me.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

So I'm curious: your work is on one hand very attentive to \"distance,\" and on the other hand these moments of \"intimacy\" keep appearing. How do you see the tension between them? How do they coexist in your practice?<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/figure>\n

<\/p>\n

Telephoto Cameraman 2017<\/strong><\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Using a camera with a maximum 8000mm digital zoom, attempting to photograph subjects from the greatest possible distance. When standing several kilometers away to film a subject, the image becomes hopelessly blurred due to the refraction of air and the limits of distance. The artist continually interrogates their own relationship to the subject across this 8000mm focal length, and discusses the relationship between subject and object within the video.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Yu Guo: Media studies has kept evolving. Early on, media were seen as extensions of the body; later as a kind of \"in-between\" state; eventually roads, oceans, clouds in the sky could all be understood as media. The emergence of AI will bring further changes. But one thing in my thinking hasn't changed: I don't believe media studies is a discipline about objects. At least my work is never about studying media for its own sake.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

So I often deliberately remind myself to be wary of this. Sometimes an artist masters a medium for understanding the world and it's like finding a kaleidoscope. A kaleidoscope might reveal a more interesting world, but if observing the world becomes a game that can be played, spinning in a closed loop, I think that becomes very dangerous. So during real fieldwork, those encounter-based moments that lie outside the creator's control, I tend to give them an anchoring position in the work. They remind both myself and the viewer that looking itself is not a mediated journey.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

But media really is the most effective handle for connecting different dimensions. So in my work I rely heavily on using a medium to establish links between different dimensions, even suturing different media together. At the same time, I appreciate and anticipate the moments when it breaks, like the snapped fishing line in Telephoto Cameraman. In many works I deliberately set points where one \"breaks the fourth wall.\" This tension isn't just about balance: I believe that using media to construct and guide looking is only an artistic means. Real understanding always happens in the moments of breaking and rupture.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Jiang Meng: I'm also reminded of what you said earlier in Split and Suture, that you strongly dislike drone footage. Perhaps precisely because that perspective carries almost no trace of the body: it's entirely a mechanical, distanced gaze at the material world.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Yu Guo: Yes. In Split and Suture, I don't need a distanced gaze, because looking at the other within different cultural bodies is already close to a distanced gaze: like standing by the Yalu River watching the other side. So I chose to use the drone perspective critically.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/figure>\n

<\/p>\n

Split and Suture: A Geography of Images 2024<\/strong><\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Single-channel 4K digital video, 00:34:56<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Split and Suture: A Geography of Images was completed following the artist's participation in a Changbai Mountain art residency organized by Diplomatic Apartment No. 12. The work sutures multiple contexts and threads within a narrative structure, placing the production systems of the art world<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

and the historical development of media alongside geopolitical threads for analysis, while remaining connected throughout to real fieldwork and real-world borders. The aim is still to understand today's complex reality.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Jiang Meng: But Concentric Circles and Tideline makes extensive use of drone footage.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Yu Guo: Different works have different phased goals. In Concentric Circles and Tideline, what I needed was precisely a distanced, refined mode of working. The shoot also produced a great deal of fieldwork material: entering a tulou, there were casual conversations with local residents and many real scenes of daily life. Had I used that material, it might have felt lively. But in the end I removed all of it and chose to use large amounts of hand-drawn animation and drone aerial photography. Because in that work my task was to distill a perceptual model from everyday space, something like training an AI to build a language model.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Why \"phased\"? Because I had already made work in many different geographical spaces, and noticed that people still tended to be more interested in the specificities of each place. In Concentric Circles and Tideline, I felt I needed, at this stage, to deliberately withdraw from a specific place to a more distant perspective, to deliberately raise a question about universality. Because my going to different places for residencies and making work is not about mining their rarity or specificity.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Think of how many biennials operate now: exhibitions use a theme to provide a distanced but universal framework, then gather fragmented and differential content from around the world to fill it. Locality gets understood as the localization of those themes. I think place, beyond providing real and vivid detail, can actually revise what we take the universal to be. And from a local vantage point, you can also look at the entire world, or even at the cosmos.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/figure>\n

<\/p>\n

Tideline and Concentric Circles 2025<\/strong><\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Single-channel 4K digital video, 00:16:16\u00a0<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Completed following the artist's residency in the Chaoshan region, the work attempts to observe the relationship between people and geographical space by distilling a model of perception.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Jiang Meng: This makes me think: from your early focus on border regions, to the China-North Korea border, to the southern coastline, the shift across these spaces: is it accompanied by some internal thread of progression? As different geographical experiences accumulate, I imagine you may also face a growing need to further conceptualize and abstract perception.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Yu Guo: It's more phased than anything else, though there are internal connections and a certain advancing thread. But that thread is not preset. If you preset a thread to advance along, the path will inevitably be narrow. My choice at this stage to do a more refined and distilled kind of work doesn't mean that's where things are heading in the future. Beyond making work, I also want to build a context for discussing artistic practice. What I call \"phased goals\" is always said in relation to context. My choice in Concentric Circles and Tideline to emphasize abstraction and distillation wasn't because I thought that mode of working was superior. It was because I felt that today people expect locality to provide concrete, vivid, distinctive content for artistic practice, overlooking the potential of using specific places to re-examine the whole and its universal questions.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Jiang Meng: Now we come to the third dimension: discourse, rhetoric, and narrative. My sense today is that this dimension in your recent work has entered a highly condensed exploration of cognitive modes. And in your earlier work this dimension was also consistently examined in terms of other elements: language, discourse, history, ideology, even metaphysics. I've noticed that you often say you don't trust any single narrative, that you favor moments of \"breaking the fourth wall.\" Like today, in Split and Suture, when you spoke about dubbing in dubbed foreign films: accepting it allows you to maintain a position as an outsider. You carry a high degree of vigilance and distance toward all the narrative coding systems inherent in documentary or image-making. Precisely because of this awareness, your work seems never to pursue a complete narrative or a closed structure. Each work is structured differently, frequently dispersive.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

But I don't think this is deconstruction. For many years, artists deeply influenced by post-structuralism have been enthusiastic about deconstructing images, but the result is often a landing in nihilism. And you're not creating a Verfremdungseffekt either. There's a subtle but crucial distinction between your \"breaking the fourth wall\" and \"alienation.\" I think alienation ultimately still points toward the sacredness of the medium itself, the mythic status that Brecht's theater occupies. The constant fourth-wall-breaking in your work seems to be something more fundamental: a distrust of narrative itself, and a persistent self-awareness seeking a way out.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

I often think of a remark Deleuze makes about painting: creation often doesn't begin from a blank canvas with nothing. The painter faces the blank and needs to recognize what figures are already there, and the painter's work is to struggle against those existing figures. The painting is the trace left by that struggle. I feel your video work also inhabits a similar struggle.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

And my final, half-formed question is this: among the many discourses you so acutely detect, official, folk, legendary, there seem to be some that haven't been entirely consciously extracted, like scientific discourse. Does it also participate in your work as a latent, unspoken figure? And then, returning finally to the body: you've said that the body can grasp the \"totality\" of space and time. But might that very pursuit of \"totality\" itself, within the discourse of contemporary art, evolve into a new kind of discourse? Especially in my personal experience, sensations across different times and spaces are often fragmented and incomplete. So is the \"totality\" the body anchors a genuine perception, or a kind of schema we have constructed within discourse?<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Yu Guo: My attention to discourse comes from a feeling that the ways in which humans describe the world today are not becoming richer but more contracted. Even though every topic appears to have completely opposing discourse systems that are irreconcilable, the spectrum itself is narrowing, like a shrinking light spectrum. In the conventional understanding, we tend to think art has a sensory and pure dimension, that it can be unaffected by discourse, or at least not easily manipulated. I believe art has a chaotic force that can't be entirely covered or encoded by discourse. But if you think you can escape discourse by simply doing as you please, like saying I'll only attend to my own feeling and not think about what discourse is operating in the background, you may produce exactly the opposite effect. Many anti-discursive gestures in artistic practice have long since become an even more rigid discourse.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

I prefer to face reality directly. But I'm optimistically inclined to think that through re-describing something, discourse might become loosened. The reason we're vigilant about the manipulation of discourse is that it has the capacity to make people accept certain views and values without reflection. And I have absolutely no worry about my descriptions also evolving into some new discourse. Any individual who wants to use fragmented experience to reconstruct a kind of \"totality\" \u2014 you can only say they're very ambitious, but that \"totality\" is unachievable, so they're destined to fail from the start. Discourse production in the art world, like academia, usually evolves into production of discursive power through the repetition of the same things by different people. I welcome the sight of an individual trying, through fragmented experience and perception, to reconstruct an impossible \"totality.\" In that process, more of the fragility of discourse tends to be exposed. So sometimes I also enjoy role-playing in my work, performing a certain way of speaking, or switching between different discourses. \"Breaking the fourth wall\" means oneself, or the viewer, is able to recognize the switch, to see things in parallel and as a whole, rather than being led along by a single discourse. I think this is more effective than simply opposing one discourse with another, or the deconstructive work of alienation.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Jiang Meng: In your 2024 works you began confronting head-on the production of context and discourse in art. Does this also mean that your own practice within this system has been seen, recognized, and has acquired a certain position? And is it precisely that change which made it possible and necessary for you to face it directly and speak about it?<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Yu Guo: Not really. When it comes to being seen, I treasure every exchange, and I find that kind of genuine individual feedback extremely valuable for a creator. And sometimes I'm fortunate, because there are always people one can truly communicate with, and the responses often exceed what I expected. But as for being recognized and identified within the art system and acquiring a certain position: I wouldn't say so. The production of context and discourse you're referring to belongs to the academic production side of the art system, like the research-based art I mentioned earlier. That mode of production is embedded within art institutions: beyond the commercial systems of galleries and art fairs, museums and foundations handle the academic production. My mode of production hasn't connected with those systems. I complete the work myself and then have it seen by audiences through two channels: galleries and screenings. But not being inside the academic production mechanism is actually an advantage. I can survive and have a voice within the art system, while remaining free to confront more directly the production of context and discourse within art.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Jiang Meng: Or would you say you also want to escape from that?<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Yu Guo: It's not escape. I was never inside it to begin with. And these questions no longer trouble me, nor will they affect my practice. What I need to think about very carefully, over a very long horizon, is whether a kind of work can sustain ongoing practice and accumulation over a very long period of time. That is what matters most to me.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Audience Member: I have a question. In Split and Suture, someone says that China looking at North Korea now is like America looking at China in the 1960s and 70s. The question of how people describe the other, and how they respond to being looked at by the other, and then using AI to reconstruct that: I found that really interesting. Could you say more about the thinking and starting point behind the work?<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Yu Guo: Sure. At the time I was actually very curious about that sentence. It wasn't an observation I was trying to make. During my residency in Changbai Mountain, I walked along the China-North Korea border, and I noticed that many Chinese people there were extremely fond of watching the other side, and would add their own commentary while doing so. Many of them were broadcasting the other bank live on their phones every day. I think there's actually a fundamental difference between taking photographs and being enthusiastically engaged in describing what you see. And many of the people watching the other side would say things like: China looking at North Korea now is like America looking at China a few decades ago. But I think that's a grammatically ill-formed sentence, because the subject and predicate are actually unclear. Still, it can serve as a point of entry in the work, because it touches on many things: the observation of the other under geopolitical conditions, the imagination of one's own image, the construction of one's own subjectivity, the evolution and development of media, and so on.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Audience Member: Why is that sentence ill-formed and lacking a clear subject?<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Yu Guo: Because I feel that sentence appears to clearly name China, North Korea, and America, but the logic beneath it may be more complex than its literal meaning suggests. Behind it lies the observation of the other, as well as imagining how the other looks at oneself, how one responds to being looked at, how one imagines the reaction the other will have to being watched: a whole series of subtle shifting questions. The subject and predicate are in constant flux. The person who says that sentence plays both watcher and watched.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Audience Member: This might not connect directly to what came before, but just now in the video there were some quite strange AI-generated images. Was this your first time using AI tools in your work? And as an artist working through that process, were there any particular feelings or experiences that stood out?<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/figure>\n

<\/p>\n

Split and Suture: A Geography of Images, 2024, video still<\/strong><\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Yu Guo: Yes, it was the first time incorporating AI into a work. It was very illuminating. 2024 was right when AI started to explode, and to make the work I looked into all the video AI models available at the time. You could see how fast they were updating, with enormous changes every month or two. I also tried to understand the differences in how different companies train large AI models. I do think the emergence of AI is a genuinely major turning point: it's not only a technological development, it also means something about how humans are beginning to take stock of their own experience and knowledge.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

The training of video image models, for example, gave me a great deal to think about. Conventional language models imitate human logical thinking, but generative AI based on image computation doesn't need to be told human logic: from enormous quantities of images it finds associations through probability. And those associations often encompass logics that humans haven't yet been able to understand or identify.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Jiang Meng: I want to add one more thought. I've long tended to think of media as neutral, but that position is starting to waver. As you mentioned, when the diversity of external discourse keeps contracting and the overall environment trends toward uniformity, can the so-called \"neutral\" truly remain neutral? The most concrete example is that AI-generated sequence in the work just now. The first time I saw it in Beijing, I didn't yet know your earlier work, and I walked straight into the exhibition space and was met directly by that footage. I felt something like fear, even a kind of resistance. I sensed that it was wrapped in a great deal of something unsettling.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

You mentioned \"suturing of experience\" earlier. I was thinking that a person's suturing of experience always carries a conscious or unconscious understanding of the present. In From Mountains to Coast, for example, you create a montage-like switching between scenes from two different spaces and times, the south and the southwest, producing a fresh experience of time and space. I can clearly recognize the texture of different regions, and I can feel the creator's presence. But AI is different. Its use of past images has no real connection to the present, and there's no \"presence\" to speak of. So the feeling it gives me is saturated with a kind of deadness, everything emptied out, like a specimen.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/figure>\n

<\/p>\n

From the Mountains to the Coast 2023<\/strong><\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

From the Mountains to the Coast<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

\u5355\u901a\u9053\u00a04k\u00a0\u6570\u5b57\u5f55\u50cf\u00a0, Single channel 4K video<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

The artist uses hand-drawn animation to recall the experience of leaving home for the first time in childhood, weaving hazy memories together with reality to trace a route of population movement from the mountainous southwest to the southern coast of China following the Reform and Opening Up. The artist adopts the micro and concrete perspective of childhood, while continually moving in and out of the narrative, allowing individual experience to be absorbed into the larger experience of the era.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Yu Guo<\/strong>Yu Guo: Yes. The emergence of AI makes it very hard to see it as a neutral medium. It concerns how humans organize their own experience and cognition, while at the same time functioning like a black box, collecting and processing information. In that process, inequality in the processing and output of information will certainly be amplified. So AI is definitely not a neutral medium.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Jiang Meng: Then let's end here. Thank you.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Yu Guo: Thank you all.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

About the Guest\uff1a<\/strong><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

\n
\n

\u4f59\u679c<\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n<\/section>\n<\/section>\n

\n
\n
\n
<\/section>\n<\/section>\n<\/section>\n<\/section>\n
\n
\n

\u4f59\u679c1983\u5e74\u51fa\u751f\u4e8e\u56db\u5ddd\u901a\u6c5f\uff0c\u4e8e2006\u5e74\u6bd5\u4e1a\u4e8e\u56db\u5ddd\u7f8e\u672f\u5b66\u9662\u6cb9\u753b\u7cfb\uff0c\u73b0\u5de5\u4f5c\u751f\u6d3b\u4e8e\u91cd\u5e86\u3002<\/span>\u4ed6\u7684\u827a\u672f\u5b9e\u8df5\u6db5\u76d6\u7ed8\u753b\u3001\u5f71\u50cf\u53ca\u5199\u4f5c\u3002\u8fd1\u671f\u521b\u4f5c\u805a\u7126\u4e8e\u5f71\u50cf\u4e0e\u6587\u672c\u7684\u76f8\u4e92\u7f16\u7ec7\u3002<\/span><\/p>\n<\/section>\n<\/section>\n

<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/figure>\n

<\/p>\n

Jiang Meng<\/strong><\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Jiang Meng is currently a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Hong Kong, with research interests in media history and media theory, as well as socially engaged art, feminism, and moving image art. Her recent and forthcoming publications appear in the Oxford Handbook of Chinese Digital Media, Journal of Contemporary Chinese Art, Art Asia Pacific, The Brooklyn Rail, Artforum, LEAP, and other venues. She is co-editor of a special issue of Journal of Chinese Cinemas titled \"Chaotic Formats,\" and previously served as assistant editor of World Records, a journal published by UnionDocs Center for Documentary Art. She received her PhD in Cinema Studies from New York University in 2024, and has curated exhibitions and screenings at SLEEPCENTER (New York), Asia Art Archive in America (New York), and Los Angeles Filmforum.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

\u00a9 All rights reserved by the artists and LongSpace<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

<\/p>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u5730\u70b9\uff1a\u5f04\u7a7a\u95f4 \u65f6\u95f4\uff1a2026.1.16 \u6c5f\u840c\uff1a\u6211\u6700\u8fd1\u628a\u4f59\u679c\u8fc7\u53bb\u00a016\u00a0\u5e74\u7684\u4f5c\u54c1\u770b\u4e86\u4e00\u904d\u3002\u6211\u5f88\u611f\u5174\u8da3\u827a\u672f\u5bb6\u6574\u4e2a\u7f8e […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":2710,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[125,1,196],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2621","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-yu-guo","category-news","category-dialogues"],"blocksy_meta":[],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/longartspace.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2621","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/longartspace.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/longartspace.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/longartspace.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/longartspace.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2621"}],"version-history":[{"count":15,"href":"https:\/\/longartspace.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2621\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2730,"href":"https:\/\/longartspace.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2621\/revisions\/2730"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/longartspace.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2710"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/longartspace.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2621"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/longartspace.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2621"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/longartspace.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2621"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}