Guanyu Xu

Yancey Richardson is proud to present Resident Aliens, an exhibition of new work by Guanyu Xu, the artist’s second solo exhibition with the gallery. With an approach that deftly combines social practice, installation and photography, Xu’s work has been defined by its expansive, multi-disciplinary approach to image-making. Building upon his previous body of work that examined the tension between his own queer identity and the normative prescriptions of his family through photography installations that were then turned into two-dimensional images, in his new series Xu examines the personal lives and domestic spaces of immigrants navigating the political demands of a changing world. Working with people of different immigration statuses, Xu explores the relationship between the bureaucratic demands of the state and the subjective expression of the individual. The exhibition will be on view from October 30 through December 20, 2025. An opening reception will be held on Thursday, October 30 from 6–8PM.

Begun in 2019, shortly before it was interrupted by the Covid-19 pandemic, and then resumed in its wake and still ongoing to this day, the works in Resident Aliens have been made inside the homes of immigrants living in cities across the United States and China. In an ever-expanding list that includes Chicago, East Lansing, New York, Hong Kong, Beijing, Nanjing and Shanghai, Xu has sought out participants caught up 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.

To create his large-scale color photographs, Xu first meets with the participants in their homes to learn about their lives, to understand their respective stories and photograph their spaces. He eventually 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 participant’s home, 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.

Though intellectually rigorous and formally complex, the images in Resident Aliens are also visually rich and deeply engaging. Snapshots of sunsets and cityscapes live alongside revealing portraits and fleeting observations, all with their own inherent meaning that Xu makes newly contingent on the images he combines them with. The inseparability of personal significance from larger structures of meaning reflects the challenging and oftentimes intrusive nature of the state system itself, which requires visa applicants to prove their economic value and social importance and even, if in a relationship, to prove their bond of love as well. By asking his subjects to willingly select images and provide materials they believe capture their identity or express the substance of their lives, Xu underscores the impossibility of such a process ever succeeding in the first place.