Guanyu Xu: Non-Linear Paths
New York City’s Yancey Richardson Gallery presents artist Guanyu Xu’s exhibition “Resident Aliens.” Working across social practice, installation, and photography, Xu examines immigrant life, evoking the bureaucratic structures that shape and constrain it.
By Gaia Squarci. Photographs by Guanyu Xu.
“Resident aliens” are foreign nationals who live in the United States without citizenship, yet meet specific criteria to be treated as residents for tax purposes, whether they are Green Card or work visa holders. Collaborating with resident aliens in both the United States and China, Xu examines the tension produced by the state’s administrative demands, which compel immigrants to re-establish their identities through the selection and submission of images and documentation.
The artist met participants in their homes, listening to their stories, photographing their spaces, and sourcing archival images from their personal lives. In a second encounter, he returned with prints of those images, installing them in the same domestic environments.
For immigrants, “home” is often a metaphorical space, impossible to define. By multiplying fractured viewpoints, these layered installations emphasize photography’s bidimensional nature, and its inherent inability to convey the complexity of human experience.
The exhibition “Resident Aliens” is on view at Yancey Richardson Gallery in New York City, until December 20.
