Temporarily Censored Home

In Temporarily Censored Home, Xu covertly situated photographs in his teenage home in Beijing to queer the normativity of his parents' heterosexual space.

These images taken in the past four years consist of portraits of himself and other gay men in their domestic settings; prints of his artworks made in the US; photographs of landscapes and built environments taken in the United States, Europe, and China; torn pages from film and fashion magazines that he collected as a teenager; and images from his family photo albums. Through positioning and layering images, he aims to juxtapose, contradict, and collapse space and time, disrupting his teenage home. It bridges the relationship between the personal and political in the context of the oppressive systems of both China and the US. Even though he would set up and take down these installations before his parents would return, Xu temporarily reclaimed his home in Beijing as a queer space of freedom and temporary protest.