Guanyu xu: I dreamt of this and there will be more

January 10, 2026 - February 28, 2026

Opening Reception: Saturday, January 10th from 5-7pm

Gallery Hours: Tues - Sat 11am - 5pm
Minnesota Street Project, 1275 Minnesota St., San Francisco

re.riddle is pleased to present I dreamt of this and there will be more, the debut solo exhibition of new works by Guanyu Xu. The opening reception is on Saturday, January 10th from 5-7pm. The exhibition runs through February 28th, 2026.

EXHIBITION STATEMENT

Guanyu Xu’s debut solo exhibition at re.riddle, I dreamt of this and there will be more, contemplates how bodies are rendered legible within visual and spatial regimes. Across his photographic works, architecture and geography function as apparatuses that are mapped, bordered, and policed, through which bodies are sorted and desires disciplined. Xu reveals how subjectivity is lived and perceived through space, landscapes, and portals such as windows and doorways, moving between public and private sites shaped by law, intimacy, domesticity, and fantasy.

Xu’s photographs and collages trace intersecting power structures, showing how the immigrant body learns to anticipate its borders and how the queer subject calibrates intimacy in relation to dominant aesthetic codes. His work poses a broader inquiry: in a so-called globalized world, how might we redefine citizenship and the legality of a person? And, in turn, how might we reshape the very architecture of looking?

By examining political borders, institutional authority, and the psychic violence embedded in contemporary systems, Xu articulates a condition of “managed freedom”, in which queerness, migration, and intimacy are continuously modulated and administered by overlapping regimes of evaluation. In One Land to Another series, the American landscape emerges as a dispositif: a layered field of projection, ideology, and control. Xu’s Asian queer body moves through this terrain as both desiring subject and contested site, exposing how sexuality is racialized and how freedom is unevenly distributed. The photographs hold tension between what is promised, what is permitted, and what is lived.

In the Temporarily Censored Home and Resident Aliens series, Xu turns from external borders to internalized ones. The home is not a refuge but a stratified environment shaped by memory, habit, prohibition, and imagination. By layering images across geographies and temporalities, from teenage bedrooms to parental homes and compressed migrant dwellings, Xu fractures domestic space and undoes the fiction of a singular identity or history contained within its walls. The home opens instead onto overlapping forces of nationalism, heteronormativity, queer desire, and migrant precarity. As such, the subject inhabits multiple spaces at once, the remembered home, the surveilled home, the imagined home, the provisional home. 

In dreamscapes between borders, these dynamics extend into abstract and bureaucratic realms, where borders recur as patterns across documents, images, and dreams. Guilloché motifs drawn from immigration paperwork operate as diagrams of control, encoding identity through repetition and verification. Xu tears, layers, and reassembles these patterns into alternative cartographies shaped by uncertainty. The series foregrounds a world in which legality, mobility, and selfhood exist in parallel yet unequal realities, where one may be legible in one domain and illegible in another.

Throughout the exhibition, I dreamt of this and there will be more, Xu’s photographs insist on embodiment as a historical and material condition, one produced through architecture, gesture, and the accumulated weight of looking. The works attend closely to how bodies are positioned, compressed, exposed, or withheld, and how these positions carry the imprint of social norms, institutional power, and visual convention. What comes into focus is the lived difficulty of occupying space under unequal conditions, where intimacy and self presentation are negotiated in relation to structures that precede and exceed the individual. Rather than resolving these contradictions, Xu’s photographic worlds sustain them, allowing divergent spatial logics to coexist without hierarchy, coherence, or closure. His images hold the body in view as it bears these pressures, registering how identity is made and unmade through contact with the environments that claim to contain it.

Artworks

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