Dr Sophie Xiaofei Guo

Sophie Guo is an art historian and curator working across modern and contemporary Sinophone and global visual culture. Her research examines how technologies have shaped artistic imaginaries around the body, gender, sexuality, race and ecology across postcolonial and postsocialist Sinophone cultures from the early twentieth century to the present. She approaches these questions through the entanglements of art, medicine and technologies across translocal and transhistorical contexts, drawing on visual medical humanities alongside feminist and queer technoscience. In particular, her work explores artistic engagements with biotechnology in socialist and post-socialist contexts; biosurveillance and disease narratives in Hong Kong and Taiwan; and the visual politics of contagion, hygiene, and colonial medical archives.

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, City University of Hong Kong and Australian National University. With Professor Ari Heinrich, she has co-edited 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, forthcoming in 2027. She is a 2026 Sir William Dobell Fellow at the Australian National University’s Centre for Art History and Art Theory.