Guanyu Xu's new series dreamscape between borders will debut at Art Basel Hong Kong 2025, presented by gdm at booth 3C24, from 26-30 March 2025.
Guanyu Xu
dreamscapes between borders
Artist Statement (March 2025)
dreamscapes between borders is an extension of my project Traversable Landscape. The project examines the ubiquity of border control, where the borders frame our lives and dreams. I collage images of various border spaces, my cellphone photographs made across different countries, and digitally-generated patterns based on the Guilloché print on my green card and its application documents. These collages confront and deterritorialize the haunted experience navigating various border spaces as an immigrant. The border architectures are destabilized by the torn prints of my photographs that are forming new maps and territories. The repetition of the Guilloché patterns I overlay with my immigration documents questions the relationship between identity and property. These entanglements push and pull, morphing into various dreamscapes. The dream is haunted by the borders, and the borders can also be taken over by dreams.
In many cases, immigrants are the scapegoat of economic disparity. In this moment of heightened xenophobia, physical and abstract borders exist on multiple levels. They migrate in and out of immigrants’ bodies and psyches. Many border spaces are overlooked or unimaginable. For example, Application Support Centers, Customs, USCIS offices (United States Citizenship and Immigration Services), consulates, and Internal border checkpoints. These spaces overwrite the freedom of immigrants and artists. They contain and control our bodies. Operating their absolute and absurd power towards people based on gender, race, sexuality, class, and ability.
A photographer frames the world. But when does the world frame the photographer? In the past few years, I have traveled to multiple places across countries. This was allowed due to obtaining the “U.S. artist green card” (EB1 category) and various visas. After my lawyer helped prepare over a thousand pages of application materials, I was asked to provide more evidence, and then I was rejected. However, my lawyer claimed it’s unbelievable. We applied again, paying the fees and sending the nearly same documents to another USCIS center. It was approved immediately. How come under the same law, the results are different? What an arbitrary use of power! I wonder, do the USCIS officers have any training in art? Do they go to museums or community art spaces? What are their bureaucratic processes of deciding a foreigner that is worthy to be an “outstanding talented”artist for this country? How can a government define who I am? Does it mean all of the image/artwork I make is framed by the U.S. government?
From a legal perspective, my identity in the U.S. is imprinted as an “artist” since I was approved by the United States government. But why can they decide? Is it from an artistic perspective or a monetary one? In the end, I only received an identification card for my “permanent resident alien” status. Nothing artistic about it. Except for the unpredictable Guilloché print on the surface of the card. It’s the mesmerizing patterns we usually see on the bank note, passport, or luxury jewelry. These beautiful mathematical lines are used to prevent forgery and to prove the authenticity. I can't stop thinking about the way in which my identity/freedom/rights are associated with money and luxury objects - representation of property and social status. These intricate patterns imprint borders onto me. Without the card, I could be detained and deported as a non-human.
As a queer person, I continue exploring questions of personal freedom in relation to societal and political structures. dreamscapes between borders ultimately questions the power dynamics embedded in systems of immigration and identity. It highlights how borders—both physical and conceptual— shape our lives, while they are constantly shapeshifting. The tension between the personal and the bureaucratic, the dream and the restriction, is embodied in these collages of images. Through dreamscapes between borders, I aim to not only confront the ruthless structures that govern mobility, identity, and freedom, but also to offer a space for reimagining a world where borders are not walls, but fluid thresholds—where the immigrant’s journey is not defined by control and exploitation, but by possibility and transformation.
