Dakota Guo (b. 1994, Taiyuan, CN) is a visual artist based in Rotterdam, NL. Working with performance, video, installation, objects, text, and sound, Dakota engages in what she calls pseudo-theory making, speculating on the intricate relationships and (im)material exchanges between the living and the (un)dead. Drawing on Chinese (necro-/cosmo-)logies, she traces a “corpse–ghost” continuum in which necrological infrastructures mediate and sustain the underworld, or the realm of yin. Her practice unfolds as a post-secular revision of “haunting.”
Her ongoing project, “Tools for Speculative Archaeology,” reappropriates archaeological “tools” to speculate on the discipline’s symbolic and material entanglements with the underworld. Conceived as a methodological fiction, the project performs archaeology as ritual trespass and ghostly inscription. Through speculative dig sites, forged field logs, artefacts, and underworld archives, she examines questions of access and restitution beyond the mortal agent.
Together with Miyoung Chang, Dakota co-initiated the duo project on East Asian horror filmmaking, Chu Renmei & Hyejoo, and she is a founding member of the Rotterdam-based SOUPSPOON Collective.
An Archaeological Report Sent to the Underworld
The exhibition "An Archaeological Report Sent to the Underworld" weaves together different artistic mediums into a speculative "dig" of ancient Chinese burial objects known as Zhènmùquàn ( 镇墓券 ), or "Tomb Quelling Documents." Revisiting the unspoken seal of entombment through a forged Tomb Quelling Document, the "speculative archaeologist" is dedicated to the "proper" repatriation of the artifact—not to any mortal agent but directly into the hands of the dead.
Retracing the current; follow the current, I wander.
Dakota Guo's video installation "( ) is ominous of ( )" was part of the group exhibition "Retracing the current; follow the current, I wander" at CHAxArtxRTM, curated by Feng Jiao.
SOUPSPOON's Summer Lab residency at Rib
Through "midnight dinners" and a final 24 hour marathon program "As if you could kill time without injuring eternity," SOUPSPOON Collective have been proposing an alternative approach to the modern, normative parameters of time to experiment with how capitalist temporality might be stretched and compressed simultaneously.
Duo project "Chu Renmei & Hye Joo"
In the duo project "Chu Renmei and Hye-Joo" two daredevil friends, Miyoung Chang and Dakota Guo, come together in an attempt to study and exhaust the conventions of East Asian horror filmmaking.
Investigating The Dialectic of Arrival
Soupspoon's collective residence project "Investigating The Dialectic of Arrival" at Goethe Institute, Rotterdam. The collective organized two public tea sessions and an open studio. Soupspoon consists of Pitchaya Ngamcharoen (TH), Raffia Li (CN), Maoyi (CN), Miyoung Chang (KR) and Dakota Guo (CN). Soupspoon is cultivating a common, Asian contextualized space for the particular, which eludes translation, as well as for an art practice of "minor gestures" and "micro politics".
How Will You Ascertain Time?
The performance installation "I snuggle into the tomb bed from my wedding chamber my hair is the quilt the spirit-guiding streamer" (2022) was included in SAVVY Contemporary's group exhibition “How Will You Ascertain Time?” curated by Hajra Haider Karrar and Sagal Farah. The performance took place at the opening of the show.