Open: Tue-Sat 10am-6pm

525 West 22nd Street, NY 10011, New York, United States
Open: Tue-Sat 10am-6pm


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Guanyu Xu: Temporarily Censored Home

Yancey Richardson Gallery, New York

Thu 13 Feb 2020 to Fri 21 Aug 2020

525 West 22nd Street, NY 10011 Guanyu Xu: Temporarily Censored Home

Tue-Sat 10am-6pm

Artist: Guanyu Xu

Yancey Richardson presents Temporarily Censored Home, Guanyu Xu’s debut exhibition with the gallery.


Artworks

Facing North, Looking West

Archival pigment print

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Worlds Within Worlds

Guanyu Xu

Worlds Within Worlds, 2019

Archival pigment print

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The Living Room

Guanyu Xu

The Living Room, 2018

Archival pigment print

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The Dining Room

Guanyu Xu

The Dining Room, 2018

Archival pigment print

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Space of Mutation

Guanyu Xu

Space of Mutation, 2018

Archival pigment print

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Rooms of Convergence

Guanyu Xu

Rooms of Convergence, 2018

Archival pigment print

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Parents' Bedroom

Guanyu Xu

Parents' Bedroom, 2018

Archival pigment print

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My Desktop

Guanyu Xu

My Desktop, 2018

Archival pigment print

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Inside of My Drawer

Guanyu Xu

Inside of My Drawer, 2019

Archival pigment print

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Since 2018, Beijing-born Chicago-based artist Guanyu Xu has secretly created photographic installations throughout his childhood home in Beijing in order to queer his parents’ domestic space, transforming it into a scene of revelation, protest and reclamation. Using countless numbers of collected images from Western film and fashion magazines, photographs from family albums, as well as portraits of himself with other gay men, Xu enacts a deeply intimate and political performance.

Xu was raised in a conservative home in a military-housing complex in Beijing, where expressions of overt non-heteronormative behavior were discouraged. With very limited exposure to the LGBTQ community in China, he understood his sexuality through Western culture, particularly film, television and fashion, which were dominated by representations of white, masculine men, under the overarching notion of the American Dream. Now living in the United States, Xu has traveled back to Beijing to activate these installations in secret while his parents were away. And through the recontextualization of images and the revisiting of his own personal history, Xu provides a poignant cross-cultural examination into oppressive systems of power.

Layered and visually complex, the photographs skew the architecture of the apartment, reconstructing each space into a dense mosaic of revealing and self-referential imagery. There are photographs taped to the ceiling, draped across furniture, covering windows and doorways, curled, layered and protruding at odd angles. Prints of nude men burst from luggage or are seen secreted in a drawer; cartoon decorations celebrating the Year of the Dog mix with images of the American flag and a Pacific sunset. For Xu, the project examines this intersectional experience as a foreign, Asian, gay man in the United States, while redefining his home as a queer space that finally acknowledges him.

Guanyu Xu (b. 1993, Beijing) lives and works in Chicago. He earned his MFA from the Art Institute of Chicago in 2019 and is the winner of the Foam Talent, LensCulture Emerging Talent and Kodak Film Photo Awards. In 2020, examples from Temporarily Censored Home will be featured in the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston and the New Orleans Museum of Art; as well as solo exhibitions at the Philadelphia Photo Arts Center and The College of East Asian Studies Gallery at Wesleyan University. His work has also been featured in a number of publications including The New Yorker and W Magazine.

The Dining Room, 2018. Archival pigment print.

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