Dr Sophie Guo

Sophie Guo is an art historian and curator specialising in modern and contemporary Chinese and global art and visual culture, with a particular focus on the intersections of art, medicine, and biopolitics across translocal and transhistorical contexts. Her research examines how biotechnology and advanced biomedicine have shaped artistic imaginaries around the body, gender, sexuality, race, and ecology within postcolonial Sinophone cultures from the late 1980s to the present. Her wider research interests include the visual medical humanities and feminist and queer technoscience; socialist and post-socialist engagements with art and biotechnology; biosurveillance, disease narratives, and art in Hong Kong and Taiwan; and the politics of contagion, hygiene, and colonial medical archives in visual culture.

She teaches across twentieth- and twenty-first-century East Asian art histories at both undergraduate and master’s levels. Key subjects and themes in her teaching include the Chinese avant-garde, feminist and queer art histories, art and technology, art and globalisation, as well as contemporary 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, Princeton University, Université de Montréal, OCAT Beijing and City University of Hong Kong. With Professor Ari Heinrich, she is co-editing a special issue titled ‘Objects of Contagion: Biohazards, Toxicity, and the Politics of Hygiene on Display in Modern and Contemporary Art in Asia and Its Diasporas’ for the Journal of the Society for Asian Humanities.