Artwork copyright Gu Xiong. Photo courtesy of Washington State Arts Commission, 2016.

Cafeteria #2, 1993

Gu Xiong
(Canadian | Chinese, born 1953)

Location: Cottonwood Elementary, Yakima

ABOUT THE ARTWORK

Artist Gu Xiong created the elaborately patterned print Cafeteria #2 as a mediation on wastefulness. The imagery was based on trays filled with discarded items that Xiong collected while working as a cafeteria busboy. The artist states, "we can produce as many things as we like, but we cannot recreate nature."

This artwork was acquired for the State Art Collection in partnership with West Valley School District.

ABOUT THE ARTIST

Based in Vancouver, Canada, multi-media artist Gu Xiong creates artworks that explore questions of cultural identity. Xiong is a professor of art at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver. His artworks are in the collections of the National Gallery of Canada, the China National Museum of Fine Arts, and the Vancouver Art Gallery, among others.

Xiong was born in Chongqing, Sichuan, China in 1953. At age 18 in 1972, during the Chinese Cultural Revolution, he was sent to live in the countryside with millions of other youths and forced into "re-education" with peasant teachers. After being allowed to return to the city, Xiong earned a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree and a Master of Fine Arts degree (1985) from the Sichuan Fine Arts Institute, where he also taught traditional woodcut printmaking. In 1986, he attended an artist residency at the Banff Centre for the Arts in Alberta, Canada, becoming the first artist from China to do so. After returning to China, he was a part of the 1989 "China/Avant-Garde" exhibition in Beijing that was shut down by the Chinese police a few hours after it opened -- four months before the Tiananmen Square protests of 1989. Gu Xiong had to flee China as a result of his participation in the China/Avant Garde show and the Tianamen Square demonstrations. He immigrated to Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada in 1989.