INTERVIEW: Circulation as Critique: Guanyu Xu’s Itinerant Images

Guanyu Xu, Holding, 2015, from the series One Land To Another. Image courtesy the artist.

INTERVIEW
Circulation as Critique: Guanyu Xu’s Itinerant Images

By Jenny Wu

The lens-based art of Guanyu Xu offers a tender critique of the aesthetics of power. Born in Beijing in 1993 and raised in the conservative household of a military officer and a civil servant, Xu grew up entrenched in the signs and symbols of geopolitics and nationalism. At home, he developed a passion for collecting images from Western movies and magazines, a habit he would later unpack and analyze in his work. Based between Chicago, where he taught at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and New York City, where he was awarded a 2023 Pioneer Works Residency, Xu is currently immersed in a body of work centered on borders and border-crossing, in both physical and metaphorical senses. Photos, he notes, have borders just as nations do, and “framing dictates what we see and know.” At the same time, as his works show, photos are containers of meaning with the power to circulate—at times freely and at times covertly—across time and space.

Let’s start with your 2014-18 One Land to Another photographs, which are these faux film stills staged, it seems, in conversation with Cindy Sherman’s works and ASCO’s No Movies. They drop the viewer right into the middle of a scene. Can you speak about the influence of film on your practice, as well as how you negotiate context and disorientation in the images you create?

During my teenage years, I watched many American films and TV series. They really formulated a version of the U.S. for me. To study photography, I also went to the Beijing Film Academy, which is famous for its filmmaking. But they also have a photography department. During my two-year study there, the discourse of learning the American genre film was never critical. This in fact enhanced my desire to come to the U.S. It wasn’t until I went to the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC) that I gained a more critical understanding of the medium as well as history. I took classes like Cinema, Race, and Representation, taught by Oli Rodriguez and Ladan Osman, and Asian Identity in Film by Tatsu Aoki. They built my knowledge of the politics of image, film, and identity.

Guanyu Xu, Photographers, 2018, from the series One Land To Another. Image courtesy the artist.

One Land To Another is a project directly responding to the lack of Asian representation in mainstream cultural production. It also traces the places I visited during the beginning time of my stay in the U.S. The project started in Chicago, and then I stayed for one month each in Philly and LA. It was a great experience for me to explore new cities with new demographics as well as interior styles.

Your work explores the way images and media enforce power structures in both the U.S. and China. There are, of course, those blockbuster movies, which propagate a Western political and aesthetic ideal and are distributed transnationally, but there’s also the way images are shared on social media by everyone from politicians to our mothers. Were you thinking about the coproduction of visual culture and power when you made your 2019 video Complex Formation?

Passively receiving images can secretly transform our desires and ideology. For Complex Formation, I was really interested in what photography is to my mom and the familial influences on me regarding beauty, class, heteronormativity, and political ideology, especially given that photography is already embedded in our everyday lives, and people often think they are “good photographers.”

By sequencing my mom’s photographs of the U.S. and Europe, I could question the visual hegemony that formed the basis of her influence over me while I grew up. The video also recontextualizes the images she made by juxtaposing them with our conversations.

Guanyu Xu, Complex Formation, 2019. Still from video, 12:59. Image courtesy the artist.

You also collected images from movies and magazines growing up, didn’t you? And that’s very much motivated by desire. Was there a moment when things changed? It was when I finally arrived in Chicago in 2014 for school that I realized the constructed myth of the U.S. Discrimination in and out of the queer community and extreme living inequality are so obvious. As I mentioned before, the critical studies in SAIC were also instrumental.

Have you since reconciled your original desire with your critiques of power?

I did it as time passed and kept studying and making my projects. Of course, the problems also keep appearing. For instance, Trump was elected in 2016. But I guess I just have to be persistent. One of my first few images made in Chicago, Sea (Lake Michigan), from One Land To Another, was created to confront my internalized homophobia as well as how violently society treats marginalized people. Through physically enduring the extreme cold, I was able to be reborn.

Guanyu Xu, Sea (Lake Michigan), 2014, from the series One Land To Another. Image courtesy the artist.

What were some of your earliest works?

They were photographs made for short fiction and poem e-magazines. I was the founder and the designer. So that’s how I started to take photographs, to have them go with the writings. I began with using my cellphone to photograph – it was the pre-smartphone era. Later, I got my first DSLR.

I may be able to find them on some hard drives back in Beijing. But I don’t know if we could still open them due to the dated software format we used.

Screenshots from Xu’s early e-magazines. Images courtesy the artist.

Artforum recently published a bilingual review of your recent show at Galerie Du Monde, Duration of Stay, by the writer Hindley Wang. A curious phrase jumped out between the translations. It was an adjective used to describe time. I think in Chinese, the phrase was “⽆无效” – something like null, ineffective, or unused, right? But in English, the phrase used is “invalid time,” which carries this connotation of woundedness, disfigurement, and trauma. I see these concepts in your photographs from this year, like The New Threshold (Interior Border Checkpoint, Niland, CA).

Guanyu Xu, The New Threshold (Interior Border Checkpoint, Niland, CA), 2023. Image courtesy the artist.

There’s the melancholic, almost desolate black-and-white landscape photo that forms the backdrop on which collage elements play. At the same time, the shapes and colors of the blue and orange photos on top are exuberant. How do you navigate between pain and joy in your works, if you think in those terms at all?

I don’t quite think of my works in terms of joy, but I do feel happy when a work is created. It’s how I express my concerns. I’ve heard many people who went through different visa processes responded strongly to my Traversable Landscape series, both in Hong Kong and my residency here in NYC. The intensive labor of preparing visas and carefully navigating the bureaucracy and state power are something many immigrants tend to put behind us. For Duration of Stay, I used The New Threshold (Interior Border Checkpoint, Niland, CA) to invite the audience to the exhibition, and it was also the last work viewers saw upon exiting the show.

I think artmaking is a way for me to reflect on the problems I encounter in society. An interior border checkpoint acts as a sudden and brutal reminder of being an outsider or potentially treated as a criminal. In 2018, I was traveling with a friend in Southern California. At the time, I had been in the U.S. for four years. We were returning from Salvation Mountain to Irvine, CA, where we encountered the interior border checkpoint. I have to emphasize that it is not the US-Mexico border. There are over one hundred permanent and temporary checkpoints like this one. They can be constructed within 100 miles of the external boundaries, and over two-thirds of the US population lives in these “borderlands.” We were stopped and asked if we were American citizens. We said no, and the agents asked for our passports. We didn’t have them because we thought having a state ID or a driver’s license was enough for us to travel within the country. Especially given that we can use that to board the plane when the airport is one of the most screened and controlled places in the U.S. The agents asked us to park aside, and they had to look into their database. We waited, and it felt like forever, especially given all the Trump madness around those years. Then, they told us we could leave and warned us that we have to always carry the passports in the future.

The collage in The New Threshold is made of sliced visa paperwork. It is the color of the sunsets and seascapes of California, and it replaces the image of the interior border checkpoint, turning it into a portal for traveling freely.

Robert Frank’s The Americans has been on my mind recently, and the limp and sidelined American flag in The New Threshold reminded me of that photo book, which is full of flags. While Frank’s project was explicitly about “photographing America” as a sociological, historical, and aesthetic concept, it was, at its heart, the document of an immigrant’s road trip.

As a photographer, I’m certainly influenced by Robert Frank. You can also see American flags appear in One Land To Another and Temporarily Censored Home (along with Chinese flags as well).

Guanyu Xu, Display Window, 2015, from the series One Land To Another. Image courtesy the artist.

I’m glad you mentioned Temporarily Censored Home (2018-19) because that was the first work of yours I ever saw. It was a photo from that series, The Dining Room (2018), at the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston.

Guanyu Xu, The Dining Room, 2018. Image courtesy the artist.

In Temporarily Censored Home, I appropriated images from One Land To Another and used them to transform my parents’ apartment physically. They were given a second life (especially since they also haven’t been exhibited much). The disorientation of Temporarily Censored Home certainly speaks to the oversaturated imagery we receive nowadays. However, it is more important for me to construct these disorienting spaces to challenge the viewer and let themexperience what marginalized people often feel when moving around this world.

When I learned about the portable and fugitive elements of your process—how you folded, carried, and hid photographs in your luggage from the US to China—I immediately thought of Yin Xiuzhen’s Portable Cities (2001–), for which the suitcase and personal artifacts (in her case, used clothing) are essential to the work. Can you speak about the function of concepts like borders and home across all your work, beyond that which explicitly explores border architecture?

I believe I saw Yin Xiuzhen’s Portable Cities in New York two years ago. They were beautiful. To visit or stay in the U.S., during this past decade, I have obtained two or three student visas, a tourist visa, and an artist visa (I got it when I was in the U.S., so I didn’t actually have the stamp.) They are the border, for sure. Photography also has borders. Photographers’ framing dictates what we see and know. I want to associate the border with power. It could be person-toperson or state-to-person. It could be a physical architecture or could be a piece of paper. It’s everywhere, could be anything, and so arbitrary. For example, in 2021, when I applied for an EB-1 green card—that’s a green card for people like artists or athletes—my first attempt was rejected. During my second application, my lawyer asked me to lock the website of my project Resident Aliens. Ultimately, my green card was approved with over one thousand pages of paperwork. Was my project Resident Aliens the reason I was rejected the first time? I have no idea. Bureaucracy and state power are so arbitrary.

Guanyu Xu, Resident Aliens, 2020–ongoing. Image courtesy the artist.

Resident Aliens is another project you started in Chicago, right? The way you depict immigrants’ homes in that series bears a strong resemblance to the way you render your parents’ place in Temporarily Censored Home.

I’ve mainly worked in Chicago for Resident Aliens. This year, I had the chance to extend the project to East Lansing, MI, and Hong Kong, where I made two and three pieces, respectively. Right now, I’m in New York to continue the project here. All these places have great diversity and more international demographics. But they also have greater wealth inequality as capitalism also thrives on exploiting marginalized people. It also feels more and more challenging to maintain the welcoming status with the rise of neo-nationalism across the globe nowadays.

Anyway, for Temporarily Censored Home, I took the risk of bringing photographs of different men in my suitcase during my trips back to Beijing. Customs is always cautious about all kinds of cultural production entering the country. Luckily, I got in without being questioned.

This concept of getting through customs was also extended to another project, Homebound (2021). I printed censored works from Temporarily Censored Home onto shipping boxes and used them to mail my personal belongings back to China from the US. Due to the COVID-19 travel restrictions and my U.S. visa status, I hadn’t been able to travel back home for almost three years at the time of the project. The boxes, a substitute for me, entered the global transportation chain. Yet they also had to be inspected or detained when going through Chinese customs. Similar to the censorship office in Shanghai (where my exhibition was censored in 2021), which is the epitome of state power, customs decides the destiny of the packages. Homebound blurs the definition of art and tests the (absurd) boundary of state power and its relationship to individual freedom. In the end, each box bears the traces of its unique and uncertain journey.

Guanyu Xu, Homebound, 2021. Image courtesy the artist.

There is something inherently personal about the idea of “home.” I also consider home to be directly related to society and the larger political system. It seems that home gives us protection from other influences. A roof over our heads also gives us privacy and separates us from political power. Honestly, anywhere I feel totally in control, I should be able to make that place a safe place, a home.

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