Lemon Guo
Bio: Lemon Guo is an interdisciplinary artist, composer, and vocalist from China. Drawn to the visceral and evocative nature of the voice, she creates voice-based performances and installations that connect people to current environmental and cultural realities. She holds an MFA in Sound Art from Columbia University and has performed and exhibited her works internationally, in places such as Rubin Museum of Art (US), BBC Radio 3 (UK), International Computer Music Conference (Korea), and Bi-City Biennale of Urbanism/Architecture (China). Lemon has held residencies at the Headlands Center for the Arts and Making Tracks. She was a commissioned composer and sound designer for the UNDP. Lemon created music for director Yi Tang’s short film All the Crows in the World, which won Palme d’Or at Festival de Cannes 2021 (France). Lemon and multidisciplinary artist Mengtai Zhang’s '19 VR documentary Diagnosia, supported by IDFA DocLab R&D program and Wave Farm/NYSCA MAAF grant, premiered at the Immersive Non-Fiction Competition at International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam 2021 and the New Frontier section at Sundance Film Festival 2022. Lemon and composer/pipa-player Sophia Shen’s experimental duo Southeast of Rain recently released their debut album 42 Days to critical acclaim. “Weaving magic from the mundane” (Songlines Magazine), 42 Days was hailed as “a collaborative gem and a highlight among this year’s new releases... inspires a sort of breathless introspection–a meditation on the perception of time and space in sound” (I Care If You Listen).
Thesis Exhibition
Artist Statement: I keep finding myself creating situations of entanglement where the performers and the viewers are trapped as one, between comfort and anxiety. The work often explores subjects that I am deeply conflicted with, such as the smog pollution and the utopian imagination of polyphonic folk choir along with its propaganda association. Perhaps the failure to find a solution or even form an opinion about these issues has unconsciously tempted me to lure other people into the same affliction. The process usually starts with an idea, and evolves around the bodies and technology in a collaborative process, toward a sense of beauty that feels human.
The thesis project is sparked from my trips to the Kam (‘Dong’ in Mandarin) villages over the last year. Kam is an ethnic minority group in the southwest of China who has a rich polyphonic singing tradition. As an outsider, I experienced a disorienting sense of time distortion. The laborious three-month long process of hammering the fabric to make it soft and bright, syncopated between mechanical and women’s hands, pulses throughout the village during waking hours. The polyphonic group singing, a sound that has been orally transmitted for hundreds of years, amplified for a need of harmonic national sounds, muted during cultural revolution, is now reheard at the beat of the cultural tourism industry. Tourist groups, cameras shutters, chatting, and guides’ voices from the megaphones, start pouring in early morning, shifting by seasons, weekends, and holidays. The unadorned alter of the earth goddess, a warrior ancestor, is quietly situated outside the main attraction areas, by houses and roaming chickens. They put a new black umbrella on it every lunar new year, and let it decay over the year. The piece comes out of my rumi- nation of this sensitive polyrhythm, and day dreams about these songs telling me vivid stories.
L to R: Do You Know Or Not (Solo performance; audience participation, paper, 2016); Not Fog, work-in-progress I (Immersive theater performance; composed and directed by Lemon Guo, costume design by Jing Li, visual projection and data sonification by Ethan Edwards, performed by Tianyi Lu, Amélie Gaulier, Anna Lublina, Anna Slate, and Lemon Guo, 2017); Alter of Sa Sui in Xiaohuang Kam village, with bucket of fabric dye and decaying umbrella