Guo Fengyi

1942-2010 · Xi'an, China

Forced into early retirement by arthritis, she took up qigong to manage the pain. The energy she felt would not stay invisible, so she drew it, five metres tall.

The life

Guo worked in a Xi’an rubber factory until illness retired her at 39. Practising qigong from 1989, she began to see figures and energy channels during meditation, and drew them to understand what she saw, joining sheets of paper as the images grew. Her family thought the scrolls strange until curators did not. In her last decade she was shown internationally, and after her death the Venice Biennale hung her among the contemporary greats.

The work

Scroll drawings in ink and colour, sometimes five metres long, of meridian maps, dragons, emperors and deities that emerge from thousands of fine wavering lines, half anatomy, half apparition. She always began at the top, never sketched, and said she drew in order to know.

Why we love them

She turned an illness into an instrument. The scrolls read like X-rays of things medicine has no machine for.

Go deeper

• Where to see outsider art, our full list of museums and collections.
• The glossary, if any of the terms here are new.

Kindred spirits

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