Dr Sophie Guo

Thesis: Bio-imaginaries: The Art of China and Its Diasporas in the Biotech Era (1989-Present)

Supervised by Dr Wenny Teo and Professor Jo Applin 

My research focuses on how biotechnology— understood as the technological use of biological reproduction and transgenic practices, and of biosecurity and life-control systems—expands artistic imaginaries pertaining to the body, race, gender, sexuality, and ecology within transnational Chinese cultures from the late 1980s to the present day. In the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, the body has increasingly been defined in biomedical, biotechnical, and biopolitical terms. This has led to a renewed focus on the body, understood through the molecular interfaces of genetic, endocrine, and immune systems. The global health crisis has witnessed a proliferation of disease imaginaries and metaphors that associate the invisible viral agents with visible identity markers, often centred around gender and race. This new condition invites a reassessment of the ways in which biopower operates on the body and the implications of ‘biologised’ notions of identity when viewed through historical and socio-political lenses.

Delving into an array of artistic imaginaries in response to genome editing, agricultural biotechnology, assisted reproductive technologies, eugenics, hormone replacement therapy, disease outbreak narratives, bio-surveillance, and viral infection in the works of six artists—Li Shan, LuYang, Jes Fan, Candice Lin, Angela Su, and Pei-Ying Lin— my thesis offers a nuanced examination of the implications of chimerical hybridity, boundary-crossing, porosity, and fluidity for the body and human identity, shaped under biotechnological conditions within multiple geopolitical and cultural contexts. These contexts are studied in relation to the transforming society of socialist and post-socialist China, the migratory, diasporic, and minority experiences of Chinese communities in Europe and America, and the unique cultural, social, and political circumstances of Hong Kong and Taiwan as marginal, subordinated city/ state.