Guanyu Xu 徐冠宇 Beijing, China, b. 1993

Guanyu Xu (b.1993, Beijing) is an artist currently based between Beijing and Chicago. Xu’s works navigates the nuances of the migratory experience through photography, new media, and installation. These movements between media operate similarly to his displaced and fractured identity.

Xu’s "Resident Aliens" is a series of intimate portraits of the immigrant experience that captures the domestic spaces of visa-holding participants. Xu visits their personal spaces and creates temporary installations using photographs he took of the same interiors and prints from his subjects' own archives. These large-scale collages speak to the fluidity and complexity of identity.

Xu is the recipient of the Chicago DCASE Artist Grant (2022); CENTER Development Grant (2021); Hyéres International Festival Prize (2020); PHOTOFAIRS Shanghai Exposure Award (2020); Philadelphia Photo Arts Center Annual Competition (2019); LensCulture Emerging Talent Award (2019) and Kodak Film Photo Award (2019). He has received artist residencies including ACRE (Chicago, IL), Light Work (Syracuse, NY), and Latitude (Chicago, IL).

His works have been exhibited and screened internationally including the Aperture Foundation, New York; International Center of Photography, New York; Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; New Orleans Museum of Art, New Orleans; Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; Wesleyan University, Middletown; Mint Museum, Charlotte; Fotomuseum Winterthur, Switzerland; 36th Kasseler Dokfest, Germany, and others.

His work is in public collections including San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Harvard Art Museums, Madison Museum of Contemporary Art, Museum of Fine Arts Houston, Museum of Contemporary Photography Chicago, and New Orleans Museum of Art.