Min-Jia Guo

Lives and works in Berlin, Germany

Artist statement

The first puppet was a peacock cut from paper, which curled into a loose roll after rain. I made it after I cut my paintings. Light illuminated the canvas, tearing through the illusions, or assurances, rendered in a painkiller haze. After being diagnosed with fibromyalgia in 2023, I rewatched Zhang Yimou’s film To Live, in which a wealthy landowner’s son becomes a shadow puppeteer during war and revolution. Watching the puppets’ wheel-like joints spin tirelessly, I recognized my own painful joints in their movements. Unable to work more than a few hours at a time, I wandered through Berlin collecting discarded wheel covers. They were emblematic of the car but also its most useless and decorative part, their radial patterns evoking flowers, fireworks, the sun—the natural and artificial, intimate and immense, merging in perpetual motion. The wheel covers eventually became molds for my animatronic shadow puppets Mother I–IV. I returned to Xi’an, the city of my childhood, to apprentice under shadow puppet master Wang Tianwen, learning to revive chemically hardened cowhide into a pliable material that reacts like living skin. Thousands of cuts reveal ornamental patterns before the hide is painted and assembled into a puppet durable enough for performance. This reciprocity between flesh and ornament led me back to painting and drawing. Carried by trade and migration, ornament travels between cultures, rooting in foreign lands like weeds. My work brings together folk art, Art...

Artwork