On-going Projects
2023-2025
Bruises on Skin
Through a retrospective on autoimmune diseases, built on subjectivity, I began to explore what it means to have a skin disorder.
In the first piece Bruises, through 3d models, sound design, text and image, I retraced the memory of a body suffering from illness.
In the second work My Body Is A Haunted Space, I try to pull the disease out of the body and shelve it in the space. In this work I have experimented with materials, narrated the perception of the body in the face of chronic illness through acting, directing, and sound design.
Cinemasia Film Festival, 2024, Amsterdam
The Last Spring
I revisits the killing sparrows movement in the 1950s in Chinese history through a return to family footages and personal dreams, accompanied by poetic monologues and delicate sound construction, exploring the blurring of emotions in reminiscence and the loss that often accompanies revelry in Chinese culture. Dealing with old memories, I had to face a complexity of bitter emotions regarding the death of my grandfather and the hidden messages that hang over the shadow in the family.
10:10, Exhibition, 2024 of Library of Babel, 2024, Amsterdam
You Shall Be My Home
You Shall Be My Home reveals the insecurity I was experiencing in my body, and I simulated the feeling of being wrapped up in as animal with the use of a very close up lens, and allowed the lens to construct an intimacy with the material by revisiting my words, colours, and brushstrokes.
03:19, Tongxin Guo, 2024
Yang Shui 羊水
I tried to write four versions of a goat story in my dream, trying to interpret the image through different perspectives and different word constructions. The real meaning of the image was dissolved in the four versions of interpretation, and turned into a dream-like ravings, just as the source of the image itself was blurred. In it, I have been recounting, with a mixture of truth and falsehood, reflecting on the association of the imagery of the goat's belly with the mother's body - in Chinese, amniotic fluid means a direct translation of the goat's water (Yangshui羊水). Thoughts of the mother's body formed a calling for me at the time of my sickness. But at the time, the physical pain was too much for me - I avoided the actual of it. In Yang Shui, I want the gaze of the image to remain on the surface. I want the whole film to land gently as if it were sliding over the skin, as in the four story interpretations of the image, hovering over the surface of the unconscious, leaving traces of moisture, but not going deeper.
14:10, Tongxin Guo, 2024
Tunnel & Vision
A- Illusions 6:39, Tunnels 6:39, 2 channel film, installation.
Latex, interactive sound installation.
B- Printed paper, shopping cart, Midjourney, installation.
A-In this Interactive Installation work, please consider the skin as a channel to the image, dissolving the boundaries that separate the viewer from the image, an encounter of our different self-worlds. I invite you to touch this medium-
B-Originating with the goats I developed, I used AI-generated images to test the regenerative of the images. I tried two approaches: a textual description of the scene plus an image cue; and five pictures of my old works. In the end I tried to incorporate the images generated in the first way into the second.
Installation at Netherlands Film Academy, 06:39, Tongxin Guo, 2024
Research Project
2025-present
Abstract
“My Night, Your Radio” is an artistic research project, through the documentation of embodied illness, unveils the unspoken forms of bodily control in a contemporary Chinese city. By weaving together the experience of disease, ghostly narratives, and fictional memory, it explores the intimate relationship between body and city, reconstructing a sanctuary for the body in a “lost hometown.” In this research, based on the metaphor of “skin”, the individual flesh and the flesh of the city gradually embed into one another, illness becomes a shared experience.
Three research tools were employed in this research: Autoethnography & Poetic Writing: Using diaries and poetry to document the entanglement of skin disorder and urban memory; Multi-media Experimentation: Employing 3D modeling, material practices, music, and sound design to reshape the body–city relation; AI & Fictional Narrative: Integrating AI-generated images and pseudo-diaries to construct a ghostly hometown suspended between reality and memory.
When truth cannot be told directly, the only way to seek it is through continuous experimentation with this fictional perspective, testing identities and content; The ultimate goal of this experiment is to weave a new layer of skin through a narrative based on my personal memories and emotions, serving as a new membrane for the narrative and becoming a new, tellable form.
Practice Plan
"Veins of Dust" is a sound-based installation inspired by my research project. The work explores themes of physical mortality and horror. The concept is to create a suspended gallows, a moment of quiet stillness where one can gaze silently at the death of control over the body. Round metal skeletons and skin materials mimic the diseased outer shell of the body, while the sound design interweaves mechanical sounds with ambient sounds, evoking a sense of shock and fear.
Under the title "My Night, Your Radio", I produced a publication that narrates the trajectory of my research and explains the shifts in its direction. The final printed and bound version will be made on a special paper.
"Anchors of Memory", approximately 50-60 minutes film, explores the boundaries between personal narrative and nonfiction in a specific context through a dialogue with physical illness. Ancient Chinese ghost stories and the metaphor of skin are interwoven into the narrative, forming a call to home. The first part will be around 20 minutes.
