Artist Talk with Guanyu Xu
In conversation with Linde B. Lehtinen
Tuesday, June 15, 2021
6:00 - 7:30 PM PDT
On Tuesday, June 15th, SF Camerawork hosted an artist talk with photographer 徐冠宇 Guanyu Xu in conversation with Linde B. Lehtinen, assistant curator of photography at SFMOMA. 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. Xu negotiates this from his perspective as a Chinese gay man. Xu states, “In my work, I migrate between mediums like photography, new media, and installation. These movements operate similarly to my displaced and fractured identity.”
ABOUT GUANYU XU
徐冠宇 Guanyu Xu (b.1993 Beijing) is an artist currently based in Chicago and a lecturer at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He is the winner of the Hyéres International Festival (2020), PHOTOFAIRS Shanghai Exposure Award (2020), Philadelphia Photo Arts Center Annual Competition (2019), Lensculture Emerging Talent Award (2019), and Kodak Film Photo Award (2019). He has received artist residencies including ACRE (Chicago, IL), Vermont Studio Center (Johnson, VT), and Light Work (Syracuse, NY).
His works have been exhibited and screened internationally including the Aperture Foundation, New York; ICP Museum, New York; Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; New Orlean Museum of Art, New Orleans; Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; Wesleyan University, Middletown; Fotomuseum Winterthur, Switzerland; Mint Museum, Charlotte; 36th Kasseler Dokfest, Germany, and others. His work can be found in public collections including The Art Institute of Chicago, the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, Museum of Contemporary Photography, Chicago, and New Orleans Museum of Art. His works have been featured in numerous publications including The New York Times, ArtAsiaPacific, The New Yorker, W Magazine, Harper's Magazine, Musée Magazine, Dazed China, Der Greif, and China Photographic Publishing House.
ABOUT LINDE B. LEHTINEN
Linde B. Lehtinen is assistant curator of photography at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA). She received her BA in art history from the University of Chicago and MA and PhD in art history from the University of Wisconsin-Madison where she wrote her dissertation on American modernist photographer Paul Outerbridge. Lehtinen has worked for several museums, including the Art Institute of Chicago, Guggenheim, J. Paul Getty Museum, Getty Research Institute, and Skirball Cultural Center in Los Angeles. At SFMOMA, she has contributed to a range of exhibitions including The Train: RFK’s Last Journey (2018), Elad Lassry: New to the Collection (2019) and most recently Bay Area Walls: Erina Alejo and Adrian L. Burrell (2021). She is also engaged in different research projects about contemporary Hong Kong photography and historical and contemporary Filipina/x/o photography. In conjunction with her curatorial work, she has published several essays and presented lectures on histories of photography in the United States and Europe.
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