SITUATION #199

Growing up in a conservative, middle-class household in Beijing, queer Chinese artist Guanyu Xu’s photo series Temporarily Censored Home confronts us with the supremacy of heteronormativity and the resulting censorship that determined his youth. Xu’s photographs show four rooms from his parental home, which he re-appropriates by adding self-portraits of himself and other homosexual US-men from his series One Land to Another (2014–), as well as torn pages from film and fashion magazines. By superimposing and dialogically interweaving various motifs in his parental space, Xu silently protests against the limited visibility of the LGBTQIA+-community within China. He furthermore exposes the consequential and unavoidable orientation towards Western ideals as well as the overrepresentation of white men. Xu’s series thus navigates between a self-reflective confrontation with his upbringing, the intersectionality of ‚race‘ and sexuality and the (re-)production of supremacy in our networked visual culture.

More by Guanyu Xu: xuguanyu.com