Darren Guo Li (b. Saskatoon, Canada) is a Chinese-Canadian artist. He obtained a Bachelor’s of Science from McGill University where he studied Quantitative Biology and attended Central Saint Martins in London, UK, where he is now based.
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darren1650@gmail.com

Statement

My practice moves across painting, drawing, installation, and writing to explore the concept of the body, particularly the queer and racialized body: how it negotiates (il)legibility, carries and distributes knowledge, affect, and memory, and is entangled with other entities. I hope to reimagine the systems that we inhabit by combining the knowledge I gained during my bachelors studies in math and biology with queer and diasporic theory and intuitive material-based making.

I’m currently exploring the idea of distributed eroticism, which is where erotic charge, knowledge, experience, and relation are dispersed across networks of persons, gestures, materials, and temporalities rather than residing solely within individual bodies or immediate encounters. One particular stream of thought I’m exploring is the body as it is framed in space and architecture in art and cinema. I’m interested in how gesture, movement, and embodiment within these frames extend the erotic porousness between self, space, object, and other. Further, I’m interested in how this framing (dis)orients the [queer and racialised] self towards the past and future along and subverting historical and contemporary power structures.