By Robin Laurence
Georgia Straight
September 22, 2005
Gu Xiong has always held
a sensitive finger to the cultural pulse. Born in Chongqing,
Sichuan Province, in the People’s Republic of China,
he was trained there in traditional drawing and woodcut
printing techniques. He applied these to his initial experience
of the West (he left China in 1989, settling in Vancouver
in 1992), in powerful graphic depictions of waste, overconsumption,
and corporate hegemony. His practice has since expanded
to include sculpture, mixed-media installation, fibre
art, photography, and text.
Through these various media, Gu has explored many complex
aspects of identity, including those of displaced individuals,
uprooted families, and hybridized cultures. “I Am
Who I Am” is a recent series of portraits of Chinese-Canadian
residents of Richmond, with quotes from them in Mandarin,
French, and English. The 10 large inkjet images on canvas
on view here echo public-art banner projects Gu has undertaken
in Shanghai and Panama City.
In recent years, Gu has also focused his camera on the
effects of globalization on his native land. In this latest
series of large-format colour photographs, some consisting
of found scenes and some of juxtaposed images in the form
of diptychs and triptychs, he articulates the jarring
state of transition he has encountered in Chongqing, Beijing,
and Shanghai, from golf courses to Dutch villages to IKEA
outlets. His art conveys both the evanescent remains of
the old China and the overpowering economic and cultural
forces that are shaping the new.
The most powerful work in the exhibition is Pepsi Home,
a photograph Gu took near a train station in Shanghai.
Because it is so filled with symbolically charged visual
incident, and because it was taken from a distance, compressing
background and foreground into the same plane, the image
appears to have been digitally composed. It wasn’t—nor
was it staged. Gu deftly caught this scene of a family,
newly arrived from the countryside, encamped in front
of a torn Pepsi ad, their bags and bundles heaped around
them. The father of the family stands in front of the
group, looking into the distance. Looking, Gu said in
a recent interview with the Straight, for home.
Folded into the image is the knowledge that globalization
is undermining China’s agricultural sector, driving
millions of rural poor into the cities. It’s a condition
that’s particularly paradoxical, Gu points out,
since Mao’s revolution built its power base in the
countryside, among the “peasants”. But time,
tradition, and political ideals, as Shifting
so eloquently shows us, have not the slightest intention
of standing still.
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In Pepsi Home, from his new photography show at Diane
Farris Gallery, Gu Xiong captures the plight of a family that
has left the countryside for Shanghai.
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