Worlds Within Worlds (2019) by Guanyu Xu, is currently displayed at the Harvard Art Museums. Jackson Davidow, the John R. and Barbara Robinson Family Curatorial Fellow in Photography, spoke with the artist about the development of his photograph, his artistic process, and public reception of his work.
Guanyu Xu: "Temporarily Censored Home is a multilayered project. The audience’s first impression is often that the series is a gay subversion of my parents’ home, a form of temporary protest. But there’s more than that. It is also about how images construct identities, how images affect our desires and ideologies. And it considers how images can react to and transform a space and how I can reclaim a space as my own.
I always want to make multilevel connections: from physical to virtual, from personal to familial to societal space. Bridging these spaces helps me better understand what’s going on. To understand larger issues, I need to look within both different spaces and different times.
This also brings up questions of privacy. If you have your own laptop as a queer person, or a person in general, you can always seek information and then hide it immediately, and nobody will know. There’s a sense of privacy in the physical intimate space you’re inhabiting, but also a larger freedom within the digital space."
Full Interview --
This August, Guanyu Xu's ongoing solo exhibition Duration of Stay at Galerie du Monde will present three new works from the Resident Aliens series, which Xu created in Hong Kong in June, profiling a Filipino domestic helper, a mainland Chinese scholar and a forced-displaced Egyptian man.
