Darren Guo Li (b. Saskatoon, Canada) is a Chinese-Canadian artist and scientist. He obtained a Bachelor’s of Science from McGill University where he studied Quantitative Biology and will begin the MA Art and Science course at Central Saint Martins in 2025.

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darren1650@gmail.com

Statement

My research-based practice works primarily in painting and drawing and is rooted in transdisciplinary thinking across scientific, queer, and diasporic frameworks. Combining theoretical inquiry, autotheoretical methods, and intuitive making, I hope to reflexively generate new ways of seeing and knowing the body and embodiment in the context of dominant colonial, capitalist, heteropatriarchical logics of being. The body is a dynamic and complex system constantly negotiating (il)legibility, reconfiguring itself, and interacting with surrounding matter. Thus, my work exists in a space of ambiguity, one where disidentification is enacted visually and materially; figures are subtly transformed and abstracted, pigments both saturated and muddied, scales and dimensions magnified and distorted. Overall, my practice can be split into several key projects working from literal objectifications of the body to metaphysical representations of emergent bodily phenomena.