At the entrance to a new Museum of Vancouver exhibition, visitors encounter a giant installation shaped like a bird in flight. To form this impression on the wall, Vancouver artist Gu Xiong relied on 3,000 crushed red Coca-Cola cans. The inspiration came from when Gu worked in a UBC cafeteria in the 1990s shortly after immigrating to Canada. Students would flatten their pop cans under their shoes before discarding them in the trash.
“You can never find two shapes exactly the same,” Gu tells Pancouver at the start of a tour of the exhibition. “The unique shape of those crushed cans inspired me to build up my new identity here in Canada.”
Becoming: The Art of Gu Xiong at the Museum of Vancouver illuminates Gu’s artistic journey through three gallery spaces. The first gallery focuses on his time in China and the second addresses his family’s life in Vancouver. The final gallery space is devoted to the retired UBC professor’s research-driven visual arts projects addressing international migration and globalization.
“This exhibition is one of the biggest that we’ve had in recent years,” Museum of Vancouver curatorial lead Denise Fong says. “It’s 6,000 square feet representing five decades of Prof. Gu’s work over time. So with each gallery, we tried to express different, important stages in Prof. Gu’s experiences.”
Pancouver is focusing on Gu’s artistry in the 1970s and 1980s in the first installment of a two-part series about the exhibition.
Born in 1953 in Chongqing—the largest city in Sichuan Province—Gu has certainly led a tumultuous life. He and his brother endured what millions of other young urban Chinese experienced during the Cultural Revolution. After high school, they were sent to a village in the Daba Mountains in 1972 for re-education from peasants.
Gu sketches hard times
In this remote part of northern Sichuan, Gu performed menial labour from dawn to dusk. At night under a kerosene lamp, he filled more than 20 notebooks with sketches of what his life was like.
“It was a totally rural area—no power, no electricity, no roads, no radio reception” Gu recalls. “We had to find everything we could eat to survive.”
The exhibition includes about 80 pieces chosen from these sketchbooks, entitled Cultural Revolution Sketchbooks. Many show scenes of people working extremely hard.
On his website, Gu notes that this was the first time he and his brother were living away from home. They burned barley straws to cook rice. They walked 10 to 15 kilometres to fetch firewood. The exhibition includes replicas of Gu’s sketchbooks, which have left a profound impression on visitors from China.
“Without these sketches, I couldn’t have survived during that time,” Gu declares. “Art saved me.”
He also reveals that his mother had advised him during the Cultural Revolution to never give up hope, no matter how difficult things became. His mother also said that he should keep working because time would change everything.
“I was young,” Gu admits. “I couldn’t understand how time could change everything—I was suffering. But after the Cultural Revolution finished, I finally understood what my mother said.”
In Becoming: The Art of Gu Xiong, he depicts a river, which is comprised of white socks along the floor. These socks represent his footprints along his journey, following salmon into a new river. Suspended above are white plastic boats.
“When we were young, we liked to fold the paper boats to put into the water to carry our dreams and hopes to an unknown future.”
From Sichuan to Banff
The government repatriated Gu and other young people back to city life at the end of 1975. He became a factory worker and went on to earn bachelor’s and master’s degrees from the Sichuan Fine Arts Institute. From 1985 to 1989, he taught at the institute just as China’s economy was starting to blossom.
Becoming: The Art of Gu Xiong displays his woodcuts from this era made from print ink on xuan paper. Entitled A Distant Place, this series marries Gu’s contemporary style with traditional scenes. It led to an artist residency and an exhibition at the Banff Centre for the Arts in the mid-1980s.
“I was the first Chinese visual artist in the Banff Centre because I saw something new,” Gu notes. “It was not totally traditional.
“In the beautiful and isolating Banff, my idea of ‘enclosure’ formed and I made a series of art works based on this concept,” he continues. “My art gradually grew from small-scale paintings to large murals, installation works, and performance art.”
Enclosures was featured in a group exhibition called China/Avant-Garde held at the National Art Museum of China in Beijing in 1989. The installation is on now display at the Museum of Vancouver for the first time in 37 years with a new Gu painting to complete the series.
Gu acknowledges that when he returned to China in 1987, he felt an unexpected sense of culture shock because things were changing so rapidly in his country. In this period he created an installation called Clouds, which is presented as an ethereal octapych in the exhibition.
“I love clouds,” Gu states. “Clouds always change but they also always being different geographical places together. It’s a symbol of freedom.”
Gu sees a different way to make art
One of the more startling pieces in the exhibition is Cultural Landscapes: White Mountain/Red Ocean, which brings together Chinese proverbs, posters that Gu collected during the Cultural Revolution, and posters from a Group of Seven Canadian art exhibition in China in 1975. According to Gu, the Group of Seven was the first foreign exhibition accepted during the Cultural Revolution.
Perhaps this was because the Canadian artists preferred gentle landscapes over hardboiled political messages. The cool tones of the Canadian paintings differed sharply from highly charged, red-infused poster art linked to the Cultural Revolution.
“We saw a different way to make art,” Gu comments.
After moving to Canada at the end of the 1980s, Gu had to reinvent himself once again. He initially returned to this country for a second artist residency at the Banff Centre. In 1990, he unveiled The Great Explosions, a series of drawings of charcoal on paper. This, too, is featured in the first gallery space at the Museum of Vancouver.
Gu decided to remain in Canada after the end of this residency which is how he ended up working at the UBC cafeteria. He brought his wife and daughter over from China and went on to make his mark as a celebrated artist, author, and professor in the Department of Art History, Visual Art and Theory at the University of British Columbia. All of this will be addressed in Part 2 of this Pancouver series.
Exhibition information
The Museum of Vancouver is presenting Becoming: The Art of Gu Xiong《雲起：顧雄的藝術歷程》until March 29, 2027. Exhibition partners include the Y.P. Heung Foundation, Canada Council for the Arts, Deux Mille Foundation, and Venture for Canada. For more information, visit the Museum of Vancouver website. To learn more about Gu Xiong, visit his personal website.
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