Untitled Art Fair, Houston
Shuling Guo
Booth A28

September 18 - 21, 2025

Untitled Art Fair, Houston
Shuling Guo
Booth A 28
VIP Preview September 18, 2025
Public dates September 19 - 21, 2025
George R Brown Convention Center

Laura (the gallery)
1125 E 11th St, Houston, TX
laura@laurathegallery.com

Laura (the gallery) is pleased to announce a presentation of new paintings by Chinese-born, Philadelphia-based artist Shuling Guo (b. 1986, Chao’An, China) on the occasion of Untitled Art Fair's inaugural Houston edition.  This solo exhibition marks the artist’s first time showing with the gallery, and her first show in Texas.

Guo’s practice has long been attuned to states of impermanence and transformation. Living for several years aboard a small sailboat, her studio adrift on the Atlantic, she cultivated a visual language shaped by the mutable elements of sea and sky: shifting horizons, dissolving currents, and the delicate registers of wind and tide. These works, suspended between figuration and abstraction, absorbed the cadences of the natural world and gave form to sensation itself. Ethereal yet structurally precise, her compositions recall the chromatic atmospheres of Mark Rothko, the spiritual geometries of Hilma af Klint, and the meditative restraint of Agnes Martin.

In recent years, Guo’s painting has undergone a profound transformation. The birth of her daughter in 2022 introduced an entirely new dimension to her work, as her canvases became vessels for lived experience of pregnancy, postpartum, and motherhood. She painted not what was visible, but what was felt: the luminous spark of life developing within, both alien and inseparable from her own body. These internal radiances expanded outward into glowing canvases that evoke the devotional energy of Georgia O’Keeffe’s tightly cropped flowers, as well as the transcendent ecstasies of Agnes Pelton and the New Mexican Transcendental Painting Group. Postpartum, the work shifted again, reflecting the radical interdependence of mother and child, and the evolving cycles of sustenance, memory, and renewal.

The paintings on view mark Guo’s movement from oceanic expanses toward a grounded engagement with the earth. Flora, foliage, and the rootedness of trees now dominate her surfaces, though the horizon line and tidal rhythms of her boat years remain as quiet undercurrents. Guo’s process starts with a liquid wash of oil paint over linen, the first mark of form and shape. She then spends hours layering colored pencil over the paint, creating a surface that glows from within. Medallion-like orbs hover at the top corners of her compositions, functioning as temporal markers that track stages of her daughter’s growth and her own evolving identity as a mother. For Guo, each canvas becomes an altarpiece, a site of devotion and transformation that invokes the continuity of life across generations. References to Chinese temple iconography and ritual gestures of venerating ancestors situate her practice within a lineage of spiritual offering. In these moments, she senses the presence of her late grandmother, whose spirit she imagines coursing through the glowing interiors of her work.

Together, Guo’s paintings chart a singular trajectory, at once personal and universal, across ocean and earth, body and spirit, past and future. They invite viewers into a contemplative space where the cycles of life, loss, and renewal converge, suffused by light.

For inquiries or additional materials, please contact laura@laurathegallery.com.

About the artist

Shuling Guo’s work emerges from personal memories of specific moments; holding her grandmother’s hand as she passed away, giving birth, and cradling her newborn daughter. At the same time, they address broader themes of transformation and regeneration, fragility and resilience. Minimal, soft and colorful, her visual language is deeply shaped by her upbringing in Chaosan, China, and her more recent experiences living in the United States.

Guo’s work draws from a diverse array of sources: the vivid imagery or temple murals and statues, known for their symmetrical structures, bold colors and intricate narratives, the layered symbolism of medieval religious iconography, and Emily Dickinson’s Herbarium, a botanical collection she compiled during her time at Amherst Academy. The dried flowers preserved by Dickinson, with their resemblance to wounded and aging bodies, evoke a sense of decay and renewal that resonates deeply with her work. Together, these influences reflect cycles of beauty, decline, and rebirth, informing Guo’s exploration of the body and self as vessels of both vulnerability and strength, and reflecting cycles of life and death.

Shuling Guo received her BFA from the Oil Painting Department of Central Academy of Fine Arts, Beijing in 2010. Guo had her first solo exhibition, Secret Fragrance, at Beyond Art Space in Beijing (2012). Since then, her work has been exhibited widely in Beijing, New York, and Miami. Recent exhibitions include her solo show Temple at Mindy Solomon Gallery  in Miami (2025), and the duo exhibition Our Currents Unleashed at Latitude Gallery in New York (2024). She has held two solo exhibitions at Fou Gallery in New York: 5—6 pm(2020), and Sotto Voce (2022). Her work was also featured by Platform Art in Autumn 2022, and selected for New American Paintings, Issue 172 (2024).