Like the 12th-century Christian saint Hildegard von Bingen, who recorded her mystical visions in captivating, vivid detail, self-taught contemporary Chinese artist Guo Fengyi produced elaborate, finely detailed drawings of her own powerful visions, fueled by her practice of Qigong and her embrace of traditional Chinese metaphysics and spirituality. Guo drew her subjects and forms from a rich confluence of practices, systems of thought, and historical sites, including cosmology, acupuncture energy maps, geomancy, and dynastic caves, all of which are becoming increasingly marginalized in a rapidly-modernizing China. Full of mesmerizing detail, rendered out of thousands of individual hatch marks and lines, and structured like charts and maps, her drawings are full of powerfully suggestive images that reference both human and otherworldly existence.
Like the 12th-century Christian saint Hildegard von Bingen, who recorded her mystical visions in captivating, vivid detail, self-taught contemporary Chinese artist Guo Fengyi produced elaborate, finely detailed drawings of her own powerful visions, fueled by her practice of Qigong and her embrace of traditional Chinese metaphysics and spirituality. Guo drew her subjects and forms from a rich confluence of practices, systems of thought, and historical sites, including cosmology, acupuncture energy maps, geomancy, and dynastic caves, all of which are becoming increasingly marginalized in a rapidly-modernizing China. Full of mesmerizing detail, rendered out of thousands of individual hatch marks and lines, and structured like charts and maps, her drawings are full of powerfully suggestive images that reference both human and otherworldly existence.