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Curator: He Chi

One

The resident ID card shows that Chen Xiaoguo is from Zhongxiang City, Hubei Province, China. He now lives and works in the suburbs of Beijing.

Beijing has a huge rural area, and there are many residents from other places in China and abroad living in the suburbs.

Xixincheng Village, located in Xingshou Town, Changping District in Beijing, is an ordinary village of Northern China. In addition to local residents and foreigners of various skin tones, a dark-skinned man lives in the purple house on the west side of the main street in the north-south direction.

Out of curiosity of the man, at the end of July 2021, Chen moved into a small house with an “Aiyo” plaque across the road.

This small house with an area of around ten square meters, Aiyo Space, is an independent and experimental space for contemporary art.

The man who lives across the street is Simon, a dancer from Cameroon with a Chinese wife. When Chen Xiaoguo had lived there for four months and was about to leave, the couple visited his house. They got to know each other and later became friends.

Two

Residency is a concept of human identity based on the locality and space of living.

Humans of this age not only live in every corner of the earth, but also various versions of maps, and various areas of the network at the same time.

People living in different geographical locations often live next to each other on the internet and the map.

On the other hand, people living next to each other are often secluded from each other in other spaces.

Everyone is a resident of a certain space in a certain place.

Rather than saying that location and space are basic conditions for becoming a resident, location and space are the material reality in which an individual resides.

As a material reality, living space and location, or former living space and location, should not be the labels of the political identity of individual residents.

Only by returning to the standpoint of an independent individual can residents disregard or transcend the various divisions and confusions that identity politics imposes or breeds.

Three

Intimacy is the initial impulse of the flesh.

Art is the awareness, maintenance, respect, nonintervention, guidance, moderation, commitment, and substitution of impulses.

Painting is intimacy.