As part of a practice of self-healing, Guo Fengyi created ink-on-paper drawings that merged the mystical, the therapeutic, and the personal. The fantastic imagery in her art, which includes small pieces on paper as well as rice-paper scrolls measuring up to thirty feet in length, was informed by the meditative state she entered through qigong. This traditional Chinese wellness system uses coordinated movement and controlled breathing to focus on qi, the energy centers of the body. Diagrams related to Chinese medicine, divination, acupuncture, and cosmology appear in Guo’s compositions alongside depictions of dragons, monstrous beings, and figures from mythology, as well as icons of international culture such as Santa Claus and the Statue of Liberty. All have diaphanous, feathery forms, in which faces emerge from the intricate lines that Guo makes with ink brushes.
Guo was born in 1942 in X’ian in China’s Shaanxi Province. When she was thirty-nine, severe arthritis forced her to retire from her job at a chemical fertilizer factory. She focused on alleviating her chronic pain by studying qigong and its movement and breathing techniques. She began creating art in her late forties as an aspect of this practice, inspired by the visions she had in trance-like states of meditation. “I heard that even those who cannot write can prescribe medicine, which to me sounds quite magical, so I decided to try drawings—that’s how I began,” she stated.
Guo started working on pages borrowed from calendars and books, drawing in black ink, and later expanded to large-scale colored ink drawings on scrolls of rice paper or fabric. She worked at a small table, making her drawings automatically, a section at a time, letting them evolve spontaneously. The opening of China to Western media in the 1970s and 1980s added a global influence to her art, from the shapes of the Egyptian pyramids to the Eiffel Tower. She wrote in her journal, “I analyze these things with energy from a distance.”
Guo’s art gained international recognition in 2002, when she collaborated with the American artist Judy Chicago on multi-venue, site-specific pieces in Lijiang in Yunnan Province, as part of the ongoing collective initiative known as the Long March Project. By the time of her death, in 2010, Guo had created over five hundred drawings, with some of her last works focusing on radiant portraits of friends and mythological entities.
Allison C. Meier, 2025
Text written as part of “Rethinking Biography,” an initiative supported by the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS).
