Reviews, essays, and poems about Gu Xiong
This essay is an excerpt from the catalog for Waterscapes, an exhibition at the Richmond Art Gallery. Mainstream narratives commonly portray the experience of migration and settlement as a profound break from the past, compelling one to either adopt unfamiliar values and customs or fiercely protect an ethnic culture under siege. The everyday lives and sensibilities of immigrants,[…]
We left the hotel in the early morning, walked through the outdoor market, bought fruit, and headed up the mountain. We took the road but soon abandoned this route to follow a narrow dirt path that skirted a few houses. Through thick drizzle, beneath a heavy cold gray sky hovering between rain and fog, we[…]
Ten years ago you left China and came to North America. Did you have any expectations of what your new home might be like? When I lived in China, I always dreamed romantically about ‘Western’ culture and thought that there was a limitless amount of freedom in North America. I wanted to live there and[…]
She reminded me to think in dreams. Somewhere there is a sketchbook, a collection of drawings of landscapes and lakes, maybe icebergs, ragged pine trees, undulations of granite, expanses of wilderness. Snow, maybe a sleigh, possibly a church in a rural village, the images are small but detailed, exquisitely executed in pencil and ink on[…]
Let us take a rational and direct perspective to look at artist Gu Xiong and his art: he was passionate and restless in the 1980s; In the 1990s, his thoughts turned to immigration and identity; Around the 2000, he initiated dialogues and made comparisons based on a new cultural identity; In the past decade, his[…]
“Tomato” (in Chinese Xi hong shi西红柿) is an ordinary object. To make ordinary objects unordinary, one of the methods is adopting the method of pop art. Through pop art, mundane daily objects are endowed with meanings, meanings in art history. “The medium is the message,” and the medium is the extension and broadening of human[…]
Gu Xiong’s art practice is an absolute global adventure if we look at his experiences as a whole. The key word in his adventure is migration. Forty years ago, the abruptly resumed National College Entrance Examination allows Gu Xiong –back then a sent-down youth in the countryside of Southwestern China – to become a university[…]
“Cultural Identity” has become a catchphrase nowadays. In English, the phrase is often heard of. When translated into Chinese, however, it becomes foreign and strange. It reminded me of the Chinese citizenship ID card for no apparent reason. When I was an “educated youth”, even though I was a proud “communard”, I didn’t have a[…]
This article was first printed in the Winter 2012 issue of The Capilano Review, “ecologies.” In their preface to Cultures of Globalization, Fredric Jameson and Masao Miyoshi write, “Globalization falls outside the established academic disciplines, as a sign of the emergence of a new kind of social phenomenon” that “seems to concern politics and economics in immediate ways,[…]
Mountains have a specific meaning to the Chinese. They are one of the elemental Taoist symbols, and featured prominently in landscape painting. In the Taoist imagination, the high mountain peak is where the Taoist “mountain man” absorbs the bright yang air of heaven, and meets the constellations face to face. “Moving the mountain” does a[…]
This essay is an excerpt from the catalog for Waterscapes, an exhibition at the Richmond Art Gallery written by Chris Lee. In recent years, multimedia artist Gu Xiong has been exploring how rivers shape the economic, cultural, and imaginary lives of migrants in China and Canada. This work, writes April Liu, offers “a deep meditation on constant mobility[…]
Karaoke Hyperspace: Gu Xiong’s Red River as a study of Placemaking was originally published in the fall 2008 issue of the Yishu Contemporary Art Journal. Instead of resting on metaphors of here/there or homeland/site of resettlement, Gu’s exhibition becomes a deep meditation on constant mobility in the physical and virtual realms of contemporary life. In her recent study of[…]
This article is an excerpt from the catalog which accompanied the installation of Coquitlam Waterscapes in the Evergreen Cultural Centre, from December 1, 2012 to January 19, 2013. Immersion in the community surrounding each installment is paramount to the meaning and accuracy of Xiong’s work as can be seen with his communication with Councillor Fred Hulbert of[…]
An excerpt from Gu Xiong — The River, the catalog from an exhibition at the Art Gallery of Greater Victoria: Gu Xiong has installed The River, his meditation on modern migrancy and displacement, twice.[1] On both occasions, the piece occupied an entire room. At Artspeak Gallery, in Vancouver, the installation comprised three components: a trail of bleached-white socks winding[…]
This essay is an excerpt from the catalog for Red River, an exhibition at the Winnipeg Art Gallery. Our understanding of place, history, time, identity, and memory is increasingly undergoing transformation within the new economy and culture of globalization. This landscape of shifting spaces of local cultures is caught up within rapid economic, political, and technological change. Globalization is[…]
We know it was hard but we can never know how hard for how hard could it be for a woman with such a smile? In Canada, when two cars collide we call the people inside accident victims. In Canada, when two cultures collide we call the people in them immigrants. Both are heavy with[…]