Zhen Guo
Choking is a self-portrait series expressing the depression and struggle I face along with women around the world. Mottled and sorrowfully distorted faces show lives caught in nightmares in which they cannot breathe. No matter how they struggle they cannot make a sound. With muscles frozen they cannot move their limbs — their hopes and souls are smothered by the weight of culture and society.
I have felt this way, squeezed by the pressures of cultures on two sides of the earth — prevented from realizing myself as a full person. Without a voice we fade away, worthless, to die silently and vanish.
Zhen Guo is a Chinese-American artist and curator born in China, graduated from Shandong Art School in 1976 and from the China Academy of Art 1982. Guo was one of the earliest explorers of art after the reform of China. She studied at San Francisco Art College in 1986 and was a visiting scholar at the School of Art of York University, Canada 1987. She established the Zhen Guo Art Studio in New York in 1988.
Guo has participated in many international art exhibitions and is committed to the research and exploration of international contemporary women's art. She organized the Existence International Women's Art Exhibition, Changsha, China, the Please Touch: Body Boundaries exhibition at the Mana Contemporary of Art in the United States, and South Korea’s Jeonbuk Museum of Art Asian Women Artists exhibition.
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