Vancouver-based artist Gu Xiong returned to his native China this summer after 12 years in Canada. His photographs of that visit are featured in China Diary, which runs through this weekend at Diane Farris Gallery (1565 West 7th Avenue). Gu's visit led him to the small farm where he was forced to undergo proletarian re-education during the Cultural Revolution. The resulting photographs seem bucolic and timeless on one level - water buffaloes in flooded paddies, and swept earth stable yards - but they conjure up dark and disturbing memories. "I carried these buckets, one at each end of a pole across my shoulders heavy-laden with animal and human waste to spread in the fields," Gu writes about an image of hand-made wooden buckets. "This lowly task taught me humility."

There seems not a trace of irony or rancor in Gu's writing, which is strange in light of what he experienced in his teenage years - forced, along with millions of other urban youths in the early 1970s, to leave his home and become an indentured servant of politically reliable farmers. Other images in China Diary present the dislocation of the new market economy in China: a Starbuck's outlet in the Forbidden City, for instance, and a funeral goods shop in which a portrait of Mao is sold side-by-side with a portrait of Audrey Hepburn.