Guo Yingguang 郭盈光 began her photographic career with Reuters, China Daily, and other media groups. Moving on to the artistic world, her creations revolve around social problems in contemporary China: women on the shelf, arranged marriages, and pseudo-intimacy between the husbands and wives who are the victims of such marriages. She uses image creation to express emotions that connect to her past. Her combination of photography and printmaking aims for melancholia, delicacy, and abstraction.
“The Bliss of Conformity” is a photography-based mixed-media series, which combines elements of video, installation and artist’s book. In this work, Guo explores arranged marriages in China and the emotionally distant coexistence between arranged couples from both abstract and concrete viewpoints. Starting from her own individual experience and the contemporary social experience at large, Guo combines documentary photography and creative artistic practices to create carefully constructed, highly contrasted visual structures that challenge stereotypical notions of women in a complex socio-cultural consciousness. Guo uses photo-etching techniques to create a series of abstract images that reveal the turbulent truths of arranged marriages beneath the seemingly calm surface depicted by peaceful images of the park.
