Guanyu Xu’s “Resident Aliens” series will be featured in UCCA Center for Contemporary Art’s first exhibition of the year — “Dream Time” opening in Beijing on 27 January 2024.
Curated by Yan Fang, “Dream Time” explores the themes of will, hope, memory, and imagination. Through the investigation of complex meanings of dreams (both as reveries and aspiration), 15 individual artists and/or art collectives around the world are invited to showcase works across various forms, and to delve into the exploration of subjectivity and empowerment. Their works are often interwoven with subjective perception, mechanisms of desire, intimate experiences, gender and cultural identity, and collective memories, forming intricate narratives that traverse spatiotemporal dimensions in the interplay of emotional textures.
Guanyu Xu's photographs explore the gap between the personal and political, highlighting the relationship between identity and domestic space.
In Resident Aliens, Xu uses the homes and personal effects of immigrants in Chicago, East Lansing in Michigan and Hong Kong to depict the lives of people who are suspended between countries and cultures.
Xu makes his images inside the homes of willing participants who are visa holders. He constructs temporary installations inside their homes from previously printed images of the same interiors and an assortment of their personal ephemera and photographs. The resulting final image breaks the interior into visually puzzling quadrants. The compositions confuse the simple domestic spaces and create what appears to be a hall of mirrors that his camera captures.
Group Exhibition “Dream Time”
27 January to 28 April 2024
UCCA Center for Contemporary Art, Beijing, China
Participating Artists:
Aslı Çavuşoğlu & İnci Eviner, Doreen Chan, Aleksandra Domanović, Feng Zhixuan, Tirdad Hashemi & Soufia Erfanian, Sky Hopinka, Christine Sun Kim, Ma Qiusha, Itziar Okariz, Peng Zuqiang, Sin Wai Kin, Chin Tsao, Evelyn Taocheng Wang, Yuyan Wang, Guanyu Xu.
Learn more --
https://ucca.org.cn/en/exhibition/dream-time/
