Dr Sophie Guo

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. 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.