Tony Guo

Tony Guo was born in 1999 in Aotearoa and grew up in China. He completed a Master of Visual Arts at AUT in 2022 and is working as a part time painting lecturer at Bachelor of Visual Arts degree, AUT.

His paintings explore sentiments of a queer emotional landscape. More in depth, he questions how absurd narratives in painting informs a deconstructive methodology against the binary ways of thinking that fundamentally reject queerness. From highly rendered details to expressive mark-making, Guo examines how the emotional gesture of oil painting integrates from its physicality into a sublime force.

Continuing on from his Master’s project, his current body of work reflects on when he came out to his parents on his 23rd birthday. Coming-out does not necessarily assure relief. It simply shifts the form of burden. Traversing through new horizons with painting, Guo entertains the trauma of coming-out from a Chinese queer context while exploring the boundary between safety and fear, humour and discomfort. These contradictions are at the core of his coming-out experience as well as the sentiments in his paintings, rendered in a child-like radiance and countered by a whimsical violence. Statuesque forms weaved together with a muted cold colour palette in a series of absurd narratives, Guo questions, with the potential of painting, what it feels like to rejoice in a dilemma that leads to nowhere and to evoke empathy amongst people like him.