Rewriting Power: Zhen Guo’s Journey from Silent Sacrifice to Feminist Art
A quiet confrontation with an artwork became the starting point of our conversation with feminist artist Zhen Guo. Sitting in the LRCCS director’s office, her eyes landed on a large photograph by Wang Qingsong (The Night Revels of Lao Li, 2000) depicting women attending to seated men — a contemporary riff on a classic Chinese painting. “They’re entertainers, not equals,” she said softly, frowning at the scene. The work itself was meant as political satire, but for Guo it captured the imbalance she has spent decades challenging through her art.
Losing and reclaiming herself
Face of Anguish 09
Guo created a series of dark-themed works that channeled her anger, struggles and pain.
Growing up in a county town during China’s Cultural Revolution, Guo experienced hardship and self-reliance early. She discovered drawing as a child after watching a visiting girl copy propaganda pictures with a pencil, and her father eventually recognized her talent. The bold colors of local peasant art shaped her eye. When universities reopened in the late 1970s, she won a coveted spot in the Chinese painting department at a top academy — China Academy of Art, only 14 students were admitted nationwide, just two of them women. She worked day and night in the studio, often painting women without yet knowing why. “I thought their forms and clothing were so interesting,” she said.
After graduation she stayed on as a teacher but, like many women, put herself second. She married, moved to the United States ahead of her husband, and gave up her own studies to support him. For years she produced saleable but unfulfilling art to earn money for the household. Her husband controlled financials, restricted her friendships, and ultimately left.
The collapse of the marriage, combined with her father’s death, plunged her into severe depression. On a psychologist’s advice she turned back to painting, using art as a form of healing. During that period, she created a series of dark-themed works that channeled her anger, struggles and pain. The process helped her survive the depression and gave her a new sense of purpose. Watching her daughter grow up also spurred her to reflect on the kind of world girls inherit.
Finding a feminist voice
By the late 2000s Guo was reading Simone de Beauvoir and Mary Wollstonecraft and realizing her story echoed that of countless women worldwide. “It’s not myself,” she concluded. “Lots of people are in worse situations.” Around 2010 she began making “angry” paintings and organizing online lectures and WeChat groups to connect feminist artists. She noticed that many Chinese women avoided the “woman artist” label, hoping to be judged as “just artists.” But she argued that in a patriarchal art world gender cannot be erased: “You still represent women,” she said.
Her own work moved from individual pain to collective representation. She built large installations of hundreds of sculpted fabric breasts — beautiful yet overwhelming — to symbolize the arc of a woman’s life from virginity to motherhood to social devaluation. Using traditional handicraft methods from her Shandong hometown, she transforms humble materials into contemporary feminist statements that have brought some viewers to tears.
Kali and dragon
Guo’s most recent series turns to the Hindu goddess Kali as a trans-cultural emblem of female power, resilience and justice.
In her tapestries she reclaimed a figure long misread as violent and ugly, showing instead a protector whose fierce courage is inseparable from infinite motherly love. She placed Kali alongside modern icons such as Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Sojourner Truth and Qiu Jin, creating a lineage of women who challenge oppression across time and cultures
Goddess Kali
Guo reclaimed a figure long misread as violent and ugly, showing instead a protector whose fierce courage is inseparable from infinite motherly love.
Through these works she hoped to inspire viewers “to embrace Kali’s spirit — to make space for women’s voices and defend their rights.”
She is also reimagining another powerful icon: the dragon. In Chinese culture the dragon traditionally symbolizes male imperial power. Her ongoing project gives it feminine qualities — curved eyelashes, fuller lips, flowing hair — to assert that even the most entrenched symbols can evolve. This time she came to the University of Michigan Museum of Art for a “dragon event,” sharing her vision of a female dragon as a living embodiment of cultural change. “I don’t want to repeat other people’s images,” she said. “I want to create a dragon with female values — still powerful, but nurturing and forward-looking.”
Today Guo runs an international network of Chinese feminist artists from her studio in the U.S. “I don’t have so many years left,” she said. “When the day of departure comes, I want to be able to say I lived, I tried.” She knows the market for feminist art is small and that change is slow, but she is determined: “Nobody had the right to take 25 years of my life. I will tell my story and help move the world forward so my daughter’s generation can reach equality.