MORE CARNAGE FEATURED: JINGYUN GUAN - “ABOVE SKIN”
What if the body never truly ends?
What if the skin — that supposed border — is only a suggestion, a trembling threshold between what we call self and everything that leaks beyond it?
Hair is a contradiction: intimate and alien, a part of us that betrays us the moment it detaches. In ABOVE SKIN, Jingyun Guan transforms this fragile material into a site of confrontation — between beauty and disgust, attraction and revulsion, life and decay. The work crawls with quiet tension. It whispers, it writhes, it refuses containment.
To encounter these images is to be reminded that the body is not clean. It breathes, sheds, decomposes. Hair becomes both witness and residue — proof of presence, a remnant of what once pulsed. Through macro lenses and delicate compositions, Guan animates this overlooked material until it feels sentient, spectral. Each strand becomes a thought, a nerve, a whisper of time growing outward from flesh.
But ABOVE SKIN is not simply a meditation on the body — it is a rebellion against its boundaries. By staging hair against necklace and the skin itself, Guan blurs the distinction between the organic and the synthetic, between tenderness and discomfort. This tension — this refusal of polish — situates the work firmly within the ethos of MORE CARNAGE: the beauty of rupture, the power of discomfort, the sacred mess of being alive.
The piece was chosen for its quiet violence. Its capacity to disturb gently, to speak softly about the brutality of embodiment. In Guan’s world, nothing is passive. Even the smallest detail — a single hair upon skin — becomes insurgent, alive, and ungovernable.
ABOUT JINGYUN GUAN
Jingyun Guan’s practice explores the contradictory properties of materials — softness and sharpness, intimacy and resistance. With a background in queer art and feminism, Guan constructs a visual language that merges personal mythology with collective experience. Their work transforms the body into a site where memory, desire, and trauma converge — oscillating between fragility and resilience. Through surreal material play, Guan’s art investigates how intimacy can both wound and heal, and how surrender can be its own act of defiance.
