Gu Xiong (artist)

Gu Xiong was born 1953 in Chongqing, Sichuan, China.[1] At the age of 18, during the Chinese cultural revolution, Xiong was sent to live in the countryside where he sketched scenes of rural life.[3] He received a Bachelor of Fine Arts and a Master of Fine Arts degree (1985)[4] from the Sichuan Fine Arts Institute.[5] In 1986, he attended an artist residency at the Banff Centre for the Arts in Alberta Canada,[6] becoming the first artist from the People's Republic of China to do so.[7] After returning to China, he was a part of the 1989 China Avant-Garde exhibition that was shut down by the Chinese police a few hours after it opened, four months before Tiananmen Square protests of 1989.[8][9][10][11] Xiong immigrated from China to Vancouver Canada in 1989.[11][12][13][14]

Xiong lives in Vancouver, where he is a professor of art at the University of British Columbia.[15][16]

Xiong is a multidisciplinary artist who works in media as diverse as painting,[17] drawing,[3] photography,[18] installation, performance,[19] video[18] and bronze sculpture.[20] He is known largely for his paintings, performances and installation works. In Interior View-- Fenced Wall, performed in 1989 at the China Avant-garde exhibition in Beijing, he painted images of a fence on paper and onto his clothing and performed with his face painted in pantomime-style.[19][21][22][23] He has also done numerous similarly titled works on paper.[24][25][26]

Xiong's work is included in the permanent collection of the National Gallery of Canada,[2] the Vancouver Art Gallery,[27] the Surrey Art Gallery and the Burnaby Art Gallery.[28]