ARTO21 SHANGHAI 2026

In Guo Zhaolin’s work, fragmented elements have always served as important clues to understanding individual experience. Through their entanglement and combination, they continually reshape the internal relationships of space. “Diorama” gathers this visual experience—situated somewhere between order and dislocation—into a single framework. Seemingly stable scenes of everyday life consequently reveal a subtle, almost imperceptible sense of estrangement. Guo does not intend to explain where this estrangement comes from. Instead, he preserves it within the composition, allowing fragments, figures, and spaces to constrain one another; just as we are accustomed to seeking a sense of security in familiar things, yet ultimately, surrounded and enveloped by them, we become acutely aware of the the distance between ourselves and the reality.

The word “diorama” derives from the Greek words *dia* (through) and *horama* (that which is seen), referring to “a scene viewed through something.” This system of looking can be traced back to the historical moment when Alberti, in On Painting, compared the canvas to an “open window” (finestra aperta). From then on, painting came to be understood as a framing surface oriented toward the external world. Later, in Perspective as Symbolic Form, Panofsky proposed the image as a “picture plane” that projects reality, though presented through the canvas, it remains firmly rooted within the framework of reality. Guo Zhaolin’s “diorama,” however, turns this tradition of “representation” inside out. Here, the logic of painting precedes the content it depicted. The passage connecting the image and the reality remains, but it sheds reproduction of external scenery. The fragments of reality presented within the work acquire entirely new associations and meanings through processes of interweaving and reconfiguration. “Diorama,” therefore, is no longer merely a box containing a scene; it becomes a mechanism through which a “scene” is constituted. It does not collect reality, but makes the world visible.

In his earlier works, Guo often used flat, monochromatic backgrounds to provide a visible condition fragmented subjects. Taking the works presented in his solo exhibition Another Person (2025) as an example, Guo’s approach—based on the principle of “identity”—focuses less on depicting “what a person looks like,” as traditional portraiture does, rather he focused on“what constitutes a person.” In other words, it is present the presence of fragmented elements that gives rise to the absence of the figure, allowing this “absence” to take form. In his recent works, rooms, interior furnishings, and architectural structures have all been incorporated into the visual system. The relationship between figures and the space has become central to the composition. This “box-like space,” therefore constructed through the arrangement of scenes, has shifted from being a functional background that supports the subject to actively participating in the generation of the image. It even reached a pictorial weight that exceeds that of the subject itself.

We can certainly recognize traces of fragments drawn from everyday life within these paintings—abstract textures, fleeting moments of memory, or accumulated remnants of the past. Yet they do not hasten to converge into a coherent narrative. Rather than tracing the origins of each image, the artist is more concerned with the internal order of the diorama and the circumstances of the individuals situated within it. Figures placed beneath the image of a “good life” continue to experience confinement and reshaping within a standardized ideal of family, even as they search for the possibility of reclaiming their capacity to choose. As unresolved experiences of life are projected into these spaces, the subtle and complex relationship between individual perception and reality gradually emerges within the “diorama.”In seemingly isolated sections of space, amid leaping visual fragments, hidden states of mind—embedded in the order of everyday life yet never articulated—quietly rise to the surface.