Nature has an agenda that neither photography nor human can comprehend or control. However, the photograph enables somekind of documentation on how nature and its surroundings act, as the photographer Beihua Guo works with. Almost like a frantic feverish dream, the photographic series Marche Funébre by Beihua Guo is a surrealistic showcasing of what natural decay is, and how humans are embedded in it. By encapsulating a ranch used for movie-production, the photographs of Beihua Guo illustrates how the present quickly becomes a historical past, and, in the meantime affects the future – just as a natural conflagration visible on an overexposed film roll.

Sometimes a return to the beginning is necessary to understand why something happened. How can photography encapsulate the remnants of a natural wildfire? In Marche Funébre, while using the blaze from fire to burn his negatives, scanning the burned result, drawing and rubbing on the results with charcoals from the ruins of the ranch, Beihua Guo explores photography as a medium. Almost as a virus that shakes the viewer’s body and being, the photographic series epitomizes the natural wear and tear of life — a story of the wood as a construction material, fuel, and a medium of art. With this obstruction on how to use photography as an artistic medium, Marche Funébre stages the abstract in contrast to the documentary.

— Nikolaj Ahlefeldt