Xuran Guo is a Chinese artist based in London, working primarily through painting. She received her BA from Pennsylvania State University in 2022 and completed her MA at the Royal College of Art in 2024.

Her practice is rooted in an interest in how emotion inhabits the body before it becomes identifiable as language. Working between figuration and abstraction, Guo constructs unstable spaces where bodily forms, memory, and psychological tension begin to dissolve into one another. Rather than depicting fixed narratives, her paintings focus on transient emotional conditions — moments of hesitation, restraint, intimacy, or psychic pressure that resist clear resolution.

Influenced by psychoanalytical writings, semiotics studies, anatomical studies, and literature, Guo approaches the body not as a stable object but as a shifting site shaped by desire, repression, sensation, and emotional residue. Her paintings often begin through blind, impulse-led drawing processes that allow instinctive gestures to emerge before conscious control intervenes. These raw marks are later interrupted by structural lines and spatial tensions, producing compositions suspended between control and collapse.

Guo’s earlier works focused more directly on the representation of flesh and corporeal distortion, whilst her recent practice has moved toward psychological metamorphosis and fragmented presence. Bodies appear only partially, dissolving into gestures, architectural fragments, or theatrical spaces. Through layered surfaces and unstable forms, Guo’s works examine how emotional experience lingers materially within both the body and its surrounding environment.

为什么说情爱就是小的呢？为什么说幽微的东西就是次等的呢？在我看来，人心就是最大的啊，它比整个世界都要大，人是万物的尺度，是存在者存在的尺度。
To me, the human heart is the grandest of all; it encompasses more than the entire world. Humanity is the measure of all things, the very gauge of existence itself.