One Land to Another/Temporarily Censored Home by Guanyu Xu

In my long-term project, "One Land To Another", I present my personal journey in the United States in a half documentary/ half fiction narrative to examine the intersectionality of race, sexuality, and citizenship. I interstice American landscapes with self-portraits in which portray the act of intimacy with other gay men. These constellations of photographs not only express alternative ways of gay male intimacy, but also interweave with my transnational way of seeing. The presence of my Asian body disrupts the dominance of queer aesthetics which privilege a narrow, “white”, masculine homonormativity. My confrontation and exploration allow a diverse representation that usually is underrepresented. Currently, I have finished shooting in Chicago, Los Angeles, and Philadelphia.

In “Temporarily Censored Home”, I covertly situated photographs in my teenage home in Beijing to queer the normativity of my parents' heterosexual space. These images taken in the past four years consist of my project "One Land To Another"; prints of my artwork made in the U.S.; photographs of landscape and built environment taken in the United States, Europe, and China; torn pages from film and fashion magazines that I collected as a teenager; images from my family photo albums. Through positioning and layering images, I aim to juxtapose, contradict, and collapse space and time, disrupting my teenage home. It bridges the relationship between personal and political in the context of the oppressive systems of both China and the US. Even though these installations were not permanent, I reclaimed my home in Beijing as a queer space of freedom and temporary protest.

Guanyu Xu (he/him) lives and works in Chicago, IL.
To view more of Guanyu's work, please visit www.instagram.com/xuguanyu and www.xuguanyu.com