Allegories of collapse

Allegories of Collapse was a solo exhibition by Guo Xiaojun, presented at SWANFALL GALLERY, London. Born in China in 1972, Guo is a multidisciplinary artist working across installation, photography, and painting. Shaped by the cultural and ideological transitions of late twentieth-century China, his practice engages with historical memory, mythological structures, and the fractured conditions of contemporary life.

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The exhibition brought together selected works from two of Guo’s key series, The New Classics of Mountains and Seas and Mayhem. Drawing from ancient textual traditions, mythic figures, and contemporary visual culture, Guo constructs unstable allegorical worlds where fiction, document, satire, and social critique intersect. Through these works, Allegories of Collapse examined how inherited narratives can be dismantled, recontextualised, and used to reflect on alienation, violence, absurdity, and the collapse of meaning within modern experience.