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 biotechnology and advanced biomedicine have shaped artistic imaginaries around the body, gender, sexuality, race and ecology across postcolonial Sinophone cultures from the late 1980s to the present. She approaches these questions through the entanglements of art, medicine and biopolitics across translocal and transhistorical contexts, drawing on visual medical humanities alongside feminist and queer technoscience. In particular, her work explores socialist and post-socialist artistic engagements with biotechnology, biosurveillance and disease narratives in Hong Kong and Taiwan, as well as 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 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.