Doris Guo’s works possess an enigmatic elegance. The Oslo-based artist was born in San Francisco in 1992 of Chinese parents, who were themselves artists, before they had to flee their country during the Cultural Revolution. Such biographical details show that Guo belongs to a generation that perceives the world from multiple perspectives, somewhere between the richness of cultural diversity and the anxiety caused by a lack of reference points. Becoming an artist is one possible response to this disorientation: transforming questions into conceptual, poetic, and quasi-psychoanalytical installations.

The ‘XO’ exhibition at Derosia Gallery in New York (2019) was emblematic of the artist’s investigations into the symbolic histories of everyday objects. The artist selected seats typical of Chinese restaurants, cut them in half and hung them on the wall in wooden boxes. The installation seemed to be a rereading of Joseph Kosuth’s One and Three Chairs (1965), adding a non-Western response to the iconic work of American conceptualism.

Two years ago, Guo began her most personal project to date. In ‘Shanghai San Francisco Richmond Seattle New York Oslo (TRACE)’, the artist presented a series of diptychs at Veronica in Seattle in 2022, then under the title ‘Back’ at Empty Gallery in Hong Kong in 2024, for her first exhibition in Asia. Everything is played out in the margins of a history split across continents and eras, brought together on a wall in an attempt to patch things up.

Guo blurs the lines between the object, its representation, and its reproductions. Children from a migrant background know that there is never only one truth.