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Bio


Zhaojun Guo (b. 1993, Nantong, China) is a painter, observer, and occasional pigment-stained philosopher currently living and working in New York. She holds a bachelor’s degree in Financial Engineering and a master’s degree in Art Anthropology. Guo relocated to New York in 2024, where she continued her artistic studies at Columbia University and Hudson County Community College, refining her skills in painting, drawing, and printmaking. In the summer of 2025, she participated in the Advanced Painting Intensive Program at Columbia University. Her work was featured in the final exhibition of the program on July 3, 2025. She joined the NYC Critic Club's Canopy Program since September 2025.

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Artist Statement

I am a painter working with acrylic, oil paint, sumi ink, charcoal, oil sticks, oil pastels, and rice paper. In recent works, I often combine painting with print-based layers, allowing pressure, transfer, and erosion to become part of the image. My process is accumulative. I build surfaces through repeated touching, scraping, covering, and returning, letting traces remain rather than correcting them.

My work grows out of the engagement with ancient visual cultures, such as rock paintings, Chinese landscape traditions, and some early mythological texts like The Classic of Mountains and Seas. What draws me to these sources is not their imagery, but their understanding of the world as something continuous and alive, where mountains, water, animals, and human presence are not clearly separated. I try to bring this way of thinking into painting through abstraction.

Instead of representing the human body directly, I work with gestures, marks, and structures that suggest organic movement. Lines may resemble rivers, or paths left by a body moving through space. Layers of color and texture behave like sediment, building up and wearing away at the same time. Printing and transfer processes introduce unpredictability, allowing images to shift, blur, or partially disappear.

For me, painting is a way of thinking through contact. It is where the body meets material, and where boundaries soften through repeated interaction. I hope the work offers a space that feels unstable but alive, inviting viewers to slow down and experience perception as something fluid, changing, and unfinished.

CV

© 2026 Zhaojun Guo. All rights reserved.

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