Artist Volumes, Issue 2, 2025
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 recontextualizing 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.
In “The Fluidity of Home,” Ramona Jingru Wang writes in response to Xu’s work:
“We know that home is not always where we are from. What we encounter in a home-looking space where we don’t belong can be both unsettling and oddly nostalgic. It is as if we begin to notice things that should be there but aren’t, as memories of past homes bleed into a present, foreign space. We struggle to establish proof of one’s existence in a home that doesn’t quite belong to us, until old memories transform into new ones, creating a space that holds warmth, security, belonging, and proof.”
ISSN: 2981-5320
All rights reserved.
© Guanyu Xu
Images courtesy of the artist.
All works by Guanyu Xu.
Text by Ramona Jingru Wang and Guanyu Xu.
Photo editor: Cristina Velásquez
Text editor: Nechama Winston
Design and Art Direction: Cristina Velásquez
Typesetting: Raleway
Printed in Medellín, Colombia by Taller Artes & Letras.
First edition / 300 copies
2025
Artist Volumes, Issue 2, 2025
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 recontextualizing 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.
In “The Fluidity of Home,” Ramona Jingru Wang writes in response to Xu’s work:
“We know that home is not always where we are from. What we encounter in a home-looking space where we don’t belong can be both unsettling and oddly nostalgic. It is as if we begin to notice things that should be there but aren’t, as memories of past homes bleed into a present, foreign space. We struggle to establish proof of one’s existence in a home that doesn’t quite belong to us, until old memories transform into new ones, creating a space that holds warmth, security, belonging, and proof.”
ISSN: 2981-5320
All rights reserved.
© Guanyu Xu
Images courtesy of the artist.
All works by Guanyu Xu.
Text by Ramona Jingru Wang and Guanyu Xu.
Photo editor: Cristina Velásquez
Text editor: Nechama Winston
Design and Art Direction: Cristina Velásquez
Typesetting: Raleway
Printed in Medellín, Colombia by Taller Artes & Letras.
First edition / 300 copies
2025
