born in Tongjiang, Sichuan in 1983, and graduated from the Sichuan Academy of Fine Arts.
Now working in Chongqing, artistic creation involves a variety of media such as imaging, and painting.
Video essay ‘Rock and Cliff' investigates the creation of Horn Town, a new model village and centre of large scale tourist development, and the experiences of rural residents moved there through government-led displacement. Horn Town is located in Wulong, a rural district near the Three Gorges Dam administered by the Chongqing municipality (a city of 30 million people). Narrated in the style of a science documentary but using local Chongqing dialect, the video brings a geological and topographical perspective to types of 'rocks' found in the area,from mythological stones from a mountain cliff, to ruins of the original settlement, to a stone sculpture from a dubious 'Land Art Biennial', in order to address issues of land acquisition, top-down development and spatial politic.
This video work is a fictional online Feng Shui guideline. A Feng Shui master on-screen in connecting to a person's brain to observe the image fragments in it and, based on that, try to give advice. It turns out to become a dispute between the two. Composed with images from real places like modern residences, high-speed train stations, national enterprises in mid of change, and mining factories, the video gives a dizzying visual effect. The artist narrates the words mixed with humorous, personal, and authoritarian languages. The work concerns the complex relationship between medium, feelings and narratives, and how a personal destiny can be narrated in relation to specific spatial-physicality.
The work was shot in Chongqing where Yu Guo lives. The artist utilises a camera with 8000mm digital zoom to capture the farthest objects that lens could reach. Because of the refraction of air and the limit of distance, the images that taken from kilometres away becomes blurred. Yu Guo continually adjusts the focal length in the process of shooting. Then, these unclear and ambiguous objects are inserted into the original or different video clips by re-editing or a collaging way. Through the misplacement of vision and the transformation of context, the original information and reference split in the images. Yu Guo attempts to interrogate the physical distance between himself and object, the relationship between subject and object in the video, and then re-examine the individual relationship and psychological distance in real life.
