MEET ARTIST TONY GUO ✨recipient of The Arts Foundation Te Tumu Toi Springboard Award for Visual Arts (gifted by the Edgar Family Foundation). Mentored by 2025 Laureate Séraphine Pick.
Tony Guo is a Tāmaki Makaurau-based painter whose work resists easy footing. Born in Aotearoa in 1999 and raised in Northeast China, he returned to New Zealand alone at twelve, a dislocation that continues to hum beneath the surface of his practice.
Often drawing from his dreams, Guo builds scenes that feel at once intimate and disquieting. Working in oil, he traces ideas of embodied history and queer survival, filtered through a kind of offbeat absurdism — where moments of humour, distortion, or theatricality sit alongside something more unsettled.
His figures appear mid-action, suspended in narratives that never fully resolve. They feel specific but slippery, resisting psychological clarity. What lingers instead is a mood. Strange, tender, and slightly off-centre, like trying to hold onto a dream just as it starts to dissolve.
We’re putting the finishing touches on the December issue, and so chuffed to announce Tony Guo as Guest Artist! 🖤
Tony Guo (b. 1999) is a painter born in Aotearoa New Zealand who grew up in Northeast China. He migrated to Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland in 2012 by himself, spending his teen years with host families while adapting to multiculturalism. Vested in modes of figurative oil paintings, Guo explores the intersections of absurdism, embodied history, and queer survival, where moments of whimsy mask an existential anguish.
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I am incredibly honoured to receive this year’s main prize paint award at NZPPA. Thank you @artwaikato , judges Evan Woodruffe, Dr Carole Shepheard and this gorgeous lady that just bought the work. I was having lunch in Shanghai when Evan called me with the news and I screamed particularly gay and loud in the restaurant….. ❤️
