Diane Farris Gallery is pleased to announce a new exhibition of work by mutimedia artist Gu Xiong.

The images in China Diary are selected from 45 rolls of film he took this past summer during a visit to his homeland where he re-visited and recorded many meaningful locations in his early life. His images of today's China are juxtaposed against some of his early woodblock prints inspired by the drawings he made while in the countryside. The subjects as they are now, of country and city life, illustrate the changing face of China.

Bicycles, July 2001 - June 1989

One such image shows the flowing mass of today's city bicycles against an image of his ink drawing "Barricade of Bicycles". Of this piece, he writes: "In 1989 I saw people use their bicycles to make a barricade to hold back the tanks. Each bicycle represented one person - all were crushed. Twelve years later the streets were still surging with bicycles. For me, those rolling waves of bicycle traffic represent the ebb and flow of economic and cultural changes in China."

At 17, during the Chinese Cultural Revolution, Gu Xiong was sent to the remote Chinese countryside to labour from dawn to dusk in the fields. By the light of a kerosene lantern he started to draw the people and objects around him. To accompany My Country Home, an image of the doorway to his room, Gu wrote, "This is the entrance to the room that became my home for four years. I found myself here at seventeen with my younger brother. We had never been away from home before. At night we would sit in the doorway and look at the moon with tears in our eyes singing songs from our earlier life. Life was changed forever. We were teenagers in the city transformed into country labourers."

Audrey Mahler film, The Yellow Pear: The Story of Gu Xiong, will be screened daily during the exhibition and available for purchase on VHS. The film offers a rich and moving tapestry of artwork, interviews and archival footage in this provocative film about the human cost of exile and the determination of an artist to tell his truth.