Guanyu Xu - Duration of Stay

7 June - 31 August 2023

Opening reception with artist's attendance: 7 June 2023, 5pm to 7pm
Venue: 11 Duddell Street, Central, Hong Kong

Galerie du Monde is delighted to announce Guanyu Xu’s “Duration of Stay”, which marks the Chicago-based Chinese artist’s first solo exhibition in Hong Kong. Influenced by the production of ideology in American visual culture and a conservative familial upbringing in China, Xu’s practice extends from examining the production of power in photography and collage, to the question of personal freedom and its relationship to political regimes.

Fractured identity and forms of belonging are central to the artist’s practice and integral to all aspects of the work in the exhibition. Juxtaposing landscapes with an intimate view of personal spaces, the power of Xu’s imagination is founded upon the negotiation and reinterpretation of images over time, making space for multiplicity and growth.

"Duration of Stay" features Xu’s work from multiple series, including his long-term project Resident Aliens that addresses the idea of citizenship and form of belonging; his new Traversable Landscape series which reveals the border regime as a space inherently perpetuating imperialism, xenophobia and racism; a 144-part installation titled Suspension which expresses the artist's powerlessness as an alien in the US during the pandemic and the suspended experience of the deadlock created by political powers; and a video work Complex Formation, where Xu questions the visual hegemony that perpetuated his mother's vision and her influence over him.

Elaborating on his Resident Aliens concept, Xu will profile a domestic helper from the Philippines, a scholar from Northern China, and a refugee from Egypt through his photography, and temporarily reconstruct their living room into a dense mosaic, unveiling a new perspective on the life of these three "resident aliens" in the context of Hong Kong.

Opening at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art in August 2023, Guanyu Xu's Temporarily Censored Home series will be featured in the museum's exhibition "Sea Change": https://www.sfmoma.org/exhibition/sea-change-photographs-from-the-collection/

About the Artist

Born in 1993 in Beijing, Guanyu Xu lives and works in Chicago. He earned his MFA from the Art Institute of Chicago in 2019. Xu was the recipient of the Fred Endsley Memorial Fellowship (2015) and the James Weinstein Memorial Fellowship (2018). He is the winner of the Lenscratch Student Prize (2019), the Foam Talent Award (2019), Lensculture Emerging Talent Award (2019), Kodak Film Photo Award (2019), and he is a Runner-up of the Aperture Foundation Portfolio Prize (2019). His works have been exhibited and screened internationally including the Aperture Foundation, New York; ICP Museum, New York; Athens Photo Festival, Greece; Format Photo Festival, UK; EXPO Chicago, Chicago; Mint Museum, Charlotte, 36th Kasseler Dokfest, Germany, and others.

His work can be found in public collections including San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, Madison Museum of Contemporary Art, Harvard Art Museums, Museum of Contemporary Photography Chicago, New Orleans Museum of Art, and FENIX Museum of Migration, Netherlands. His works have been featured in numerous publications including The New Yorker, W Magazine, Photo Vogue Italia, Aint-Bad Magazine, Musée Magazine, Der Greif, and China Photographic Publishing House.

For more information, please contact: enquiry@galeriedumonde.com