The New Yorker Profiles Alum Guanyu Xu

Photographer Guanyu Xu (BFA 2016, MFA 2019) was profiled in the New Yorker. Xu, who grew up in Beijing, in a traditional household came to SAIC in 2014. On a trip back to China last year, Xu brought with him a suitcase with hundreds of printouts of his photographs, which include provocative images of nude portraits of men he met on hookup apps. When his parents left for work, Xu set about transforming the family home into an art installation, plastering the walls and windows with a collage. Selections from his portfolio joined advertisements from glossies that he had collected as a teenager and black-and-white snapshots from family albums for the work Temporarily Censored Home. "Xu likes to cast his series as an act of reclamation, even rebellion—an attempt, as he writes, to 'queer the heteronormativity' of his parents’ household and, in so doing, to disrupt the domesticity that smothers him during his visits home," states the article.