SWANFALL GALLERY proudly presents Allegories of Collapse, a solo exhibition by Guo Xiaojun. Born in China in 1972, Guo Xiaojun is a multidisciplinary artist working across installation, photography, and painting. His formative years were shaped by a rapidly shifting cultural landscape, influenced by the ideological transitions of the late 20th century. The intellectual revival of literature and art, fuelled by growing global exchanges, introduced new possibilities in artistic language and historical reflection. Guo’s works embody this evolving discourse, critically engaging with the past while addressing the fractures and paradoxes of modernity.
Allegories of Collapse brings together selected works from two of Guo’s pivotal series: The New Classics of Mountains and Seas and Mayhem. The former draws inspiration from the ancient text Classic of Mountains and Seas, appropriating its logic of naming and symbolic structures to construct a heterogeneous cosmology embedded with fragments of contemporary life. The latter offers a raw, visceral encounter with absurdity and violence, reimagining the mythic figure of Sun Wukong to evoke the turbulence of identity, the grotesqueries of urban existence, and the pervasive alienation of thought.
Across these series, Guo employs a rigorous cross-media visual language to dismantle the boundaries between historical memory and the immediacy of the everyday. Mythical figures are extracted from their distant symbolic origins and situated within the fragmented realities of the present, amidst the collapse of information systems, psychological displacement, and social discord. In this context, allegory ceases to operate as a conduit to absolute truths, emerging instead as a precarious form of storytelling that can persist amid ruins.
Crucially, Guo is not simply exposing fractures in inherited archetypes, but instead uses them strategically to anchor his works in a broader historical-cultural framework, then reshapes them to critique the present - intensifying the tension between mockery and solemn inquiry. By manipulating and recontextualising these established narratives, he heightens the contradictions between satire and gravitas, crafting a space where aesthetic mastery becomes inseparable from a deeper interrogation of the structures that underpin contemporary life.
Through this interplay of fiction and document, symbolism and materiality, Guo’s practice ultimately transcends formal concerns to deliver a profound meditation on how we inhabit, mythologise, and contest the paradoxes of our time.
PRIVATE VIEW
2 October 2025, 12:00 - 18:00