Creator Record
Metadata
Name |
Xiong, Gu |
Dates & places of birth and death |
b. 1953 in Chongqing, Sichuan, China |
Nationality |
Canadian/Chinese |
Role |
Artist |
Biography |
Gu Xiong (b. 1953 Chongqing, China - ) is a multimedia artist from China who settled in Vancouver, British Columbia after immigrating in 1989. He works with installation, painting, drawing, printmaking, sculpture, photography, video, digital imagery, text, and performance art. Xiong’s practice centres on the creation of a hybrid identity arising from the integration of different cultural origins. Through the critical angle of visual art, his work encompasses sociology, geography, economics, politics, and literature, as well as the dynamics of migration, invisible labor, globalization, local culture, and identity politics, through which he constitutes an amalgamation of multiple cultural histories and seeks to create an entirely new identity. Xiong received his BFA and MFA degrees from the Sichuan Fine Arts Institute in Chongqing, China. He twice attended the Banff Centre for the Arts as artist-in-residence, in addition to residencies hosted by various colleges and universities in Canada, the United States, and China. As Professor in the Department of Art History, Visual Art and Theory at the University of British Columbia, Gu Xiong is engaged in both studio art and contemporary art theory. Xiong has exhibited nationally and internationally, including more than sixty solo exhibitions and three public art commissions. He has participated in over one hundred prominent national and international group exhibitions, including the 17th Venice Architecture Biennale Parallel Exhibition (The Change of Enclosed House – A Dialogue About Chinese Immigrant Architecture, 2021); the Second Anren Biennale in Chengdu (A Confrontation of Ideals, 2019); Every. Now. Then: Reframing Nationhood at the Art Gallery of Ontario, 2017 (Toronto); Border Zones: New Art Across Cultures at the UBC Museum of Anthropology in Vancouver, 2010; Post Avant-Garde Chinese Contemporary Art – Four Directions of the New Era in Hong Kong, 2007; the Shanghai Biennale, 2004; MultipleCity in Panama, 2003; Le Mois de la Photo in Montreal, 2001; the Montre´al Biennale, 2000; the Gwangju Biennale, 1995; Here Not There at the Vancouver Art Gallery, 1995; and the ground-breaking exhibition China Avant-Garde at the China National Museum of Fine Arts in Beijing, 1989. His works are represented in the collections of the National Gallery of Canada Ottawa), the National Art Museum of China (Beijing), and the Vancouver Art Gallery, among many other museums and private collections. |
