Xianghui Guan: The Protagonist

Xianghui Guan is a visual storyteller navigating the space between image and narrative. His work probes how individuals shape a sense of self amid the fractures of family, institutions, memory, and language. For him, images are not mere representations—they are perceptual sites, memory containers, and vessels of emotional residue.

In The Protagonist, his painted novel, Guan dismantles the hierarchy between word and image. He treats the image as an autonomous force, generating subjectivity through visual disruptions—blurring, occlusion, fragmentation, and symbolism. Themes of childhood, migration, illness, and familial loss emerge not as nostalgic illustrations, but as visual nodes that provoke embodied perception.

For Guan, the exhibition becomes a space of memory. He asks: how do we construct an inner world when confronted with an image, a face, a trace? His paintings do not aim to explain. They inhabit the spaces that language cannot reach.

Xianghui Guan was born in Henan, China, and holds a BFA and MFA in painting from the Sichuan Fine Arts Institute. His work has been exhibited internationally, with solo and group shows across China, the United States, Korea, Japan, and Canada. A seasoned artist and educator, he has taught studio art, drawing, and painting at the Sichuan Fine Arts Institute and led international workshops focused on identity and memory through visual expression.