Evidence, Guanyu Xu

Evidence features works from Guanyu Xu’s series Resident Aliens, which examines the personal lives and domestic spaces of people living with different immigration statuses. Made in cities across the U.S. and China, Xu collaborates with those who are caught in the administrative web of citizenship and legal status, a process requiring them to re-establish their identities through the careful selection of information, images, and documentation. Xu explores the relationship between the bureaucratic demands of the state and the subjective expression of the individual while making each image. Within the space of home he reveals what must be protected and what can still be taken away. 

To create his photographs, Xu first meets with participants in their homes to learn about their lives, understand their stories, and photograph their spaces. He then asks them to select meaningful images from their personal photo albums that he then prints. On a subsequent visit, Xu constructs a temporary installation inside each collaborator's space, using both his own images and theirs to create a dense and layered arrangement before photographing it to produce a collage-like final image. 

Through recontextualising archival photographs and merging multiple perspectives together, Xu’s images not only trouble the distinction between authorship and reproduction, between what is intimate and what is social, but they also speak to the fragmented nature of the immigrant experience, one being made increasingly more fraught and precarious with each passing day. 

Published by New Poetics Publishing
Softcover
9 pages
210 x 220 mm
ISBN 29815320