Dr Sophie Guo

Associate Lecturer

Sophie Guo is an Associate Lecturer in Modern and Contemporary Asian Art at The Courtauld Institute of Art. She specialises in contemporary art from China and its diasporas within transnational and global contexts. Her current research project examines how biotechnology and advanced biomedicine shape artistic imaginaries around the body, gender, sexuality, race, and ecology within transnational and post-colonial Sinophone cultures from the late 1980s to the present. Her research interests encompass visual medical humanities, feminist and queer technoscience, socialist and post-socialist art and science, mythmaking and parafiction, politics of migration, politics of hygiene and contagion in visual culture, and the use of colonial medical archives in contemporary art. She teaches a range of topics spanning the twentieth and twenty-first centuries in East Asian art histories for undergraduate and master’s students. Key subjects and themes of her teaching include: Chinese avant-garde, feminist and queer art histories, art and technology, art in globalisation, contemporary Asian art and the ‘New Silk Road.’

She has participated in conferences organised by the Association for Art History and the European Association for Chinese Studies and has delivered invited talks at institutions including Chisenhale Gallery, Zabludowicz Collection, Princeton University, Université de Montréal, OCAT Beijing, and City University of Hong Kong. She is a member of the British Art Network of the Paul Mellon Centre.


Education

  • PhD History of Art, The Courtauld Institute of Art
  • MA History of Art, University College London
  • BA History of Art, University College London

Teaching

  • MA ‘Global China: Contemporary Chinese Art and Infrastructure’, 2024/25
  • BA2 Beyond the Great Wall: Mapping Contemporary Art on the ‘New Silk Road’ 2024/25
  • BA3 ‘Body, Space and Power in Contemporary Chinese Art’ 2024/25
  • BA3 Lessons in Critical Interpretation 2022/23
  • Spring 2020: Guest Lecturer, Global China (MA)
  • Autumn and Spring term 2019: BA 2 Frameworks for Interpretation

Selected Publications


Research Interests

 

  • Contemporary art and visual culture
  • Gender, sexuality, and race
  • Feminist and queer technoscience
  • Visual medical humanities
  • Contagion, disease, and immune system discourses
  • Sinophone studies, colonial histories, postcolonial theory, and globalisation
  • Parafiction

Conferences and Other Events


Other Activities

 

  • Research Associate, Barbican Art Gallery, 2022-2023
  • Editorial Board, immediations, the peer-reviewed postgraduate journal of the Courtauld Institute of Art, 2019
  • Research Assistant to Dr Wenny Teo, Senior Lecturer in Modern and Contemporary Asian Art

Citations