The exhibition the Book of Current unveils a series of paintings and video works accomplished by the artist Avita Guo in recent years. The exhibited works include previous paintings executed in her Icelandic residency in 2016, new paintings and video works accumulated since she arrived in Beijing after being trapped in Hainan following the outbreak of the epidemic at the beginning of this year.

Guo returned to her hometown, Qinghai, for a two-month art residency in September last year. The artist came across the memory through the broken narratives hold in old photos. However, the course of middle-class gentrification had obliterated the site of the original plan for fieldwork. Thereout, Guo has developed the narrative language of the catena, which embarks on the poetic text cohering the fractures of the memory itself. As a link to Guo’s Triptych narrative methods, the timeline of this exhibition focuses on the present. She pieced together a series of paintings and video works from recent years' experience of geopolitics, the rapid development of the Internet, and her life circumstance after the pandemic outbreak.

The paintings Daily Life, 2020, The Last Memory of a Hardcore Winter, 2020, and Inner Empire Landscape, 2016 are section portrayals the real-life landscape. The torn wound, the endlessly changing, suspicious pink and blue mountains, clouds, abstracted like Photoshop-blurred landscape. These are the abstract, sci-fi, and violence-embedded records the artist carries along drew on the perception of the real spectacle. The chapter of figurative paintings is the Leviathanic shadow depiction, which echoes her interpersonal relationship and social anxiety of individuals in the current chaotic society. Guo’s video works are practically a synthesis and internalization of her personal experience, life fragments, and field investigations. The exhibition will present two video works she accomplished recently. Since the artist went to Hainan to spend the winter at the end of last year, a sudden epidemic had forced her to inhabit a tropical area for a long time. Being far removed from her accustomed work environment, she could only choose to collect, photograph material, and write. During this period, writing is somewhat a self-salvation for Guo, and the resulting text laid the foundation for the creation of A Song of the Sea, 2020. This video installation employs the artist's typical methodology of image juxtaposition to create a string of ethereal poetic narratives. The scene begins with the ocean of Hainan and gradually joins the whale vocalization from the deep sea. The image materials collected or captured by the artist during the epidemic affects the entire video in a surreal, dreamlike way. The work No Space for Loner and Promise, 2020, is Guo's new attempt at video discipline. The video starts through computer typing, and screen recording meanwhile intersperses with short films that look ostensively like life fragments. Guo departed from personal experience to comprehend and refer to the more essentially metaphysical ideology, furthermore enable the viewers to immerse in the screening like a writer.