The late Guo Fengyi’s mesmerizing works were long considered those of an “outsider artist.” As a self-taught former chemical analyst whose drawings centered largely on spirituality and mysticism, Guo fit the bill for that term. Her colored ink drawings—which she only started making in her mid-forties as an extension of her meditative practice of qi gong—are phantasmagoric and often inscrutable. Such pieces are filled with flowing figuration and complex symbology, touching on everything from Buddhism and the I Ching to cosmology and acupuncture charts. Many works take the form of massive vertical scrolls—some nearly 30 feet tall—in which vivid forms seem to spiral off into diagrams, landscapes, and renderings of interior worlds. It’s a testament to Guo’s uncompromising vision that her drawings have drifted, as vivid and cloistered as ever, out of the periphery and into the slipstream of the contemporary. She is featured in The Artsy Vanguard 2020.