Portraits Of LA's Homeless Become Sacred Art - Religion Unplugged

“I left my hometown / My hometown appears,” begins a poem by artist Shuling Guo titled “Temple II,” which shares its name with her forthcoming solo exhibition at Hollis Taggart Downtown. Drawing on sacred symbolism and nature, Guo delves into her memories of growing up in Chaoshan, Guangdong Province, China, and the area’s unique mixture of spiritual and folk traditions. Her dreamlike, symmetrical works speak to the harmony of the cosmos as much as they nod to the balance of life and the sublime. Guo’s paintings in Temple II explore memory, presence, and loss, and their creation coincided with both the birth of her daughter and the death of her grandmother. Burgeoning blossoms, delicate flames, and glowing ribbon-like tendrils allude to the transience of life, its beauty, and its fragility.

It might feel like Issy Wood is staring right back at you, glaring out of every canvas, making hard, uncomfortable, unflinching eye contact. But she’s not. The young British painter is staring at herself, lost in soul-searching rumination. You’ve just walked in at the wrong time. This display at the National Portrait Gallery – the first in a new series of presentations looking at contemporary artists’ use of portraiture – is Wood’s first big public foray into capturing her own face. She’s painted self-portraits before, but never at this scale, never this big and personal. For years now, her focus has mainly been on external stimuli: Diet Coke cans, antiques, clocks, ceramics, leather coats. The stuff of midnight doomscrolling, obsessive research, fetishistic desire. Seeing her close-cropped, soft-focus approach to everyday ephemera over the years has been like spying on someone’s internet tabs, peeking into the diary of a bored, sad, overtired, caffeine-wired young overachiever. She never really needed to paint her face because her work was always so obviously personal and diaristic. But she’s done it anyway, and the results are tense and heightened.