A series of boy-nymph figures rendered in purple-blue hues struggles inside an iridescent cool-green universe. Sitting with Tony Guo in his studio, I am looking at his latest body of work, a suite of five oil paintings—Toil, Reap, Bump, Harvest and Plod (all 2023)—that make up the series ‘Sand’, presented by Jhana Millers Gallery in August 2023.
Set in the surreal landscape of figurative oil painting, ‘Sand’ is a queer allegory telling tales of identity as a vector of labour. Taking its title from the 1975 short story about a book with infinite pages, ‘The Book of Sand’ by Jorge Luis Borges, ‘Sand’ recounts the artist’s recent visit to his grandparents’ graves in Northeast China. Guo re-examines their (and, by proxy, his own) history as informed by migration, war and revolution. Survival is the central tenet or, rather, the contemplative force that lurches forward as one casts one’s eye over the works.
The parable of survival plays out most strikingly in the largest of the five paintings, Toil. Five nude figures work the pump of a shoreside pig-machine, a gangling contraption you might expect to see at a fairground. Six pink piglets are attached to the steaming flue, leaking white fluid from their eyes and trotters. In conversation, Guo and I discuss the influence of Martin Esslin’s 1960 essay ‘The Theatre of the Absurd’. Esslin proposes that, above all, the absurd builds a world where “everything that happens seems to be beyond rational motivation, happening at random or through the demented caprice of an unaccountable idiot fate.”[1] The ‘product’ of the efforts made by the five figures who work the contraption of Toil is inscrutable. Two figures pull with their full strength as one might at a rowing machine, but why keep working when the effort has no obvious end goal or prizes?
‘Sand’ is a queer allegory telling tales of identity as a vector of labour.
A series of self-portraits, ‘Sand’ warps linear time, allowing Guo to appear at multiple points across each painting and within a single scene. Toil as both a queer and working-class allegory exacts the core philosophy of Esslin’s absurdity: wherein, emancipated from logic, personhood becomes a mere prop, time a plaything.
Idiosyncratic rather than symbolic, the seemingly overt escape into adventure and fantasy that Toil presents fades quickly into scenes of alienation: the endless dilemma of the working class, the infinite nihilism caused by machines and their facile systems. As Donna Harraway asserts in ‘A Cyborg Manifesto’, “the extreme mobility of capital and the emerging international division of labour are inter- twined with the emergence of new collectivities and the weakening of familiar groupings.”[2] This weakening can only be reconciled by honest attempts to give form to the invisible processes that shape our lives. Here, ‘Sand’ finds its conceptual, visual and narrative strength. Guo’s allegories have no specified meaning. No beginning, middle or end. In their absurdity the works offer a playfully dark personal history alongside a vast reimagined world, full of limitless potential beyond apprehension, for both the artist and the audience alike.
[1] Martin Esslin, ‘The Theatre of the Absurd,’ The Tulane Drama Review 4, no. 4 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1960), 3.
[2] Donna Harraway, ‘A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century,’ in Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (New York: Routledge, 1991), 166.
