Xu Guanyu’s (b. 1993 in Beijing, China) photographs expand, extend, and exploit spaces to tell manifold stories using images sourced from domestic settings, popular culture, and his oeuvre. The artist employs collage technique in a particular manner in his photography. Collage allows the artist to compress fragmentary materials from different spatiotemporal situations to reveal what the imaginary and symbolic fail to articulate; similar to the queer subject, the act of collaging resembles the ability to recast violence, and rearrange the aggressive and reflect the substance in style.

Rather than cutting, editing, and arranging materials on the work, Xu utilises the art form before the moment of the photoshoot. To photograph Space of Mutation (2018) and Opened Closets (2019), Xu returned to Beijing and temporarily intervened in his parents’ house, creating elaborate photo collages and installations in the space, and photographed the apartment when his parents were away. In these prints, Xu violently tears up the domestic space by placing countless made and collected photographs such as images from family albums, torn ads and editorials, self-portraits, and pictures of him with other American gay men in the interior. Such a peculiar creative process is relevant to Xu’s adolescent memories and sexuality. As a teenager, he was forbidden from hanging posters on his bedroom walls. Instead, he accumulated a stash of film and fashion magazines. Xu’s parents have supported his art career and they thought he was only photographing snowy cityscapes and suburban still-life; both have no idea that their son is interested in men, and has been temporarily overloading the apartment with queer images and memories.

These complex tableaux embedded with personal and intimate narratives capture the disruption of the norms of sexuality, cultural hegemony, and nationalism; they also highlight how the artist’s entrapment and intersectional experience between the contradictory yet sometimes alike cultural forces of China and the United States form his conflicting diasporic identity. On another hand, it shows that sexual politics is not always and necessarily goal-oriented or marking a perpetual overthrow of the patriarchal and racial power complex, it can sometimes be process-oriented, transient, and even indiscernible.

Xu Guanyu in The New Yorker:
https://www.newyorker.com/culture/photo-booth/a-chinese-photographers-secret-installations-inside-his-parents-home