When: February 9th, 2023 at 4:00pm – 5:00pm

Where: Weitman Gallery, basement of Steinberg Hall

Join 徐冠宇 Guanyu Xu for the opening of his solo exhibition Temporariness as Formation.

Temporariness as Formation showcases Guanyu Xu’s three projects, Temporarily Censored Home, Resident Aliens, and Complex Formation. Made between Beijing and Chicago, these projects focus on the temporariness of identities and personal freedom and their relationships with society.

In Temporarily Censored Home, Xu overtly situated photographs in his teenage home in Beijing to queer the normativity of his parents’ heterosexual space. It bridges the relationship between personal and political in the context of both China and the US. Produced in Chicago, Resident Aliens presents photographic installations within immigrants’ interior spaces to examine their personal histories and complex experiences. The project offers temporal monuments to their life and blurs the boundaries between the familiar and foreignness, private and public, belonging and alienation. In the video work Complex Formation, Xu edited cellphone images taken by his mother during their trips to the US and Europe, along with 3D animations Xu made. The video is accompanied by his monologue and conversations with his mother on their varying ideas of art, cultural influence, the American Dream, the ideal life, safety in both the US and China, and the potentiality of the future.

This event is in part sponsored by Washington University in St. Louis Center for the Study of Race, Ethnicity and Equity’s Small Grants program.