The world can seem strange and lonely when you step away from your family and everything you have built for yourself. Yet beauty may also appear. In the autumn of 2019, Guo traveled to New York to take up her position as a visiting professor for a year, leaving her child and partner behind in London. What she experienced, however, amidst excursions throughout the city and time spent on her own, was solitude and a destabilizing of self. Her encounter with American culture and people threatened her sense of identity and threw her into a crisis—of meaning, desire, obligation, and selfhood.

Radicals, or bushous, are the building blocks of Chinese characters; they are the “root” from which all words get their meaning. In this feminist lexicon, as she threads together her search for creative and personal freedom, Guo illuminates the integral role language plays in forming our sense of self.

Radical is an individual and etymological journey, and an ardent love letter. It is an expression of one artist’s fascination with Western culture and her nostalgia for Eastern landscapes, and an attempt to describe the space in between.