Closing the Fall 2024 Photography Lecture Series the MassArt Graduate Programs and Photography department are pleased to welcome Guanyu Xu. Please join us in the Tower Auditorium at 2pm on Tuesday, December 3.

徐冠宇 Guanyu Xu (b.1993 Beijing) is an artist currently based in Chicago. Influenced by the production of ideology in American visual culture and a conservative familial upbringing in China, Xu’s practice extends from examining the production of power in photography to the question of personal freedom and its relationship to political regimes. He negotiates this from the perspective as a Chinese gay man. In his work, Xu migrates between mediums like photography, new media, and installation. These movements operate similarly to his displaced and fractured identity.  

He is the recipient of the Chicago DCASE Artist Grant (2022), CENTER Development Grant (2021), Hyéres International Festival Prize (2020), PHOTOFAIRS Shanghai Exposure Award (2020), Philadelphia Photo Arts Center Annual Competition (2019), and Kodak Film Photo Award (2019). He has received artist residencies including ACRE (Steuben, WI), Light Work (Syracuse, NY), Latitude (Chicago, IL), and Pioneer Works (New York, NY). His works have been exhibited and screened internationally, including the Harvard Art Museums, Cambridge; International Center of Photography, New York; Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; New Orlean Museum of Art, New Orleans; Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco; Wesleyan University, Middletown; Fotomuseum Winterthur, Switzerland; 36th Kasseler Dokfest, Germany, and others. His work can be found in public collections, including the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, Madison Museum of Contemporary Art, Harvard Art Museums, the Museum of Contemporary Photography Chicago, and so on. His works have been featured in numerous publications including The New York Times, ArtAsiaPacific, The New Yorker, W Magazine, Harper's Magazine, Dazed, and China Photographic Publishing House.

All Photography lectures are free and open to the public.

Questions? Contact gradprogram@massart.edu

Image: Guanyu Xu, Solo Exhibition, Temporarily Censored Home at Fotografia Europea, Reggio Emilia, Italy. Installation photo by Matteo Losurdo