June 2025
Between Skin and Soul
Jingyun Guan
Solo Exhibition Programme
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Jingyun Guan
Jingyun Guan is a London-based Chinese artist whose practice spans painting, performance, and installation. They holds an MA in Fine Art Drawing from the University of the Arts London.
Guan’s work explores the tension between softness and sharpness, vulnerability and resilience—reflecting feminist and queer perspectives through materials such as wax, tights, cotton wool, and silicone. Their practice transforms bodily forms into sites of memory, desire, and healing, where fragility becomes a source of strength.
Influenced by surrealism and personal mythology, Guan’s visual language merges intimacy and strangeness, inviting viewers to contemplate the boundaries between trauma and recovery, the private and the public self.
Hair, as an ambiguous presence on the body, is like s stray organism living upon the skin. It exists on the threshold between the inside and the outside: both an extension of the flesh and something that seems to escape it. “Above Skin” therefore carries a double meaning - it refers at once to the surface of the body and to the fragile boundary between the physical shell and the immaterial world of consciousness.
Photography, Variable Size, 2023
Above Skin
The series originates from my attention to the overlooked details of daily life, where the sudden appearance of hair in unexpected places evokes strikingly different psychological responses. Hair is not inert matter; it is alive, endowed with its own agency.
It grows, falls, decays, changes colour, reviews. In this sense, hair becomes a movement - an intimate clock that silently records the passage of time within our private world. Through it, traces of our identities are revealed.
Ultimately, the question emerges: if the flesh beneath the skin is the vessel of life, then could the hair upon it be the soul that hovers above?
By photographing body hair in various situations and juxtaposing it with organic and inorganic materials, I explore how hair reflects stories of the body and gender. The work situates hair within domestic and public contexts, inviting viewers to confront their own emotions, discomfort, or desires when encountering hair in “incongruous” circumstances. These images cultivate an atmosphere of ambiguity - both alluring and unsettling - where hair becomes a site of projection and imagination.
Date With The Snail
Acrylic on canvas: 56x76cm
Snails possess the remarkable ability to secrete various types of mucus, enabling them to navigate obstacles effortlessly. With a blade, they can climb over it unscathed—a trait that lends them an intriguing allure. Inspired by this, I created alien frogmen on snail shells and fingers, conjuring mucus as a symbol of resilience.
The butterfly in the artwork references Zhuangzi's philosophical concept of the Dream Butterfly, which suggests the difficulty of distinguishing between reality and illusion. When one perceives a clear difference between the two, it signals an inherent problem in understanding.
For me, the hand represents a sexual organ, a powerful metaphor for vitality. I used the shape of my right hand as a mould, sculpting it in wax. The sensation of wax against the skin is both hot and painful, and its colour mirrors that of skin after being forcibly peeled away, creating a space for imagination and reflection.
Wax, clothes, 30 x 6 cm
Growing a new hand from the nerves
On My Way Home
Stockings, cotton, meat hooks, silicone, 100x160cm
Home is a feeling to me, and I often walk on the way home, with full of confusion. I feel like no one is waiting for me, longing for me. My feeling is like a cold razor blade cutting through my skin. Where is my home?
Due to the influence of feminism, I used flesh colored stockings as materials to make sausages, and made some blood vessels and wounds with cotton wool. They looked like scars on my mother's belly, and their overall shape was like a uterus, maybe it was home.
When I was in high school, I was a very melancholic child with severe anxiety, so I walked two kilometers home every day. On my way home one day, beside the speeding traffic, I saw a sausage lying quietly on the roadside. I passed by it day by day, and it rotted and turned black day by day. During that time, I put myself in the role of a sausage, and I felt that the sausage was me.
More About Jingyun Guan
Jingyun Guan is a London-based Chinese artist whose practice spans painting, performance, and installation. Guan graduated from University of Arts London with a MA in Fine art Drawing.
My work primarily focuses on observing and discussing the seemingly contradictory properties of objects—softness and sharpness. As an artist with a background in queer art and feminism, I often utilise the characteristics of materials and text to express my personal experiences and emotions, while developing my own unique language. A childlike style serves as a key feature in my drawings, allowing me to convey my sense of belonging and personal narrative through my creations. Additionally, my work is influenced by unconscious surrealism, combining various elements to explore the mysterious aspects of life.
In my art, the body becomes a site where memory, desire, and trauma converge. It is a shifting terrain that constantly oscillates between fragility and resilience. Through physical engagement with materials, I investigate how we carry traces of others within us, and how intimacy can be both suffocating and regenerative.
By placing personal mythology alongside shared experience, my work asks whether healing emerges from resistance or from surrender. It is always moving between being fragile and being strong, between private and public, between wounds and recovery.
Guan's work employs various media and materials to explore themes of personal mythology, feminist perspectives, and queer identity. Using materials such as wax, tights, cotton wool, and silicone, Guan creates tactile forms that evoke both vulnerability and resilience. These pieces investigate the tension between softness and sharpness, reflecting nuanced expressions of concealed identity and personal emotion.
—— Jingyun Guan