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Facing North, Looking West

Guanyu Xu

2019

Archival pigment print

56" x 70"

Xu was raised in a conservative family in Beijing. In this series, he stages his childhood home with his own artwork and assorted ephemera and then photographs the created environment to reclaim his familial space as a queer place of belonging and freedom. According to the artist, this series a two-fold secret—his family does not know he is gay or about this project: “This secrecy is exactly like my project: a secrecy that happens at home. I always concealed my real artwork from my family in these years. And this time, too, I have to hide it again. Each installation had to be finished and taken down before my parents come back home from work. My photographs of mutilple homosexual spaces in the US temporarily queered my teenage home, confronting this normativity and power of the phenomonelogy of object and architecture.”

Credit

Museum Purchase Fund (confirm credit line, if designated fund)