ARTISTS
Courtesy the artist and Fondazione In Between Art Film
HE XIANGYU
HOUSE OF NATIONS
2021
Video
28 min., 58 sec.
Set during the Covid-19 pandemic, He Xiangyu’s House of Nations is an intimate and elusive portrait of a young Chinese man living in a rooming house for international students in Berlin. Adopting a cinema verité approach, the film closely follows its protagonist over the course of two years, recording his daily errands, social gatherings, and other private moments. The film reveals little information about this man, nor does it provide any moments of narrative tension. In rejecting the conventions of documentary filmmaking, the artist allows his subject to stand in for the anonymous and alienated figures that populate urban spaces, thereby offering an indirect comment on globalization’s false promises of a borderless world.
ABOUT THE ARTIST
He Xiangyu was born in 1986 in Liaoning, China, and is based between Beijing and Berlin. He is known for producing multiyear projects employing a diverse range of mediums—from painting to sculpture, installation, video, and printed matter—to investigate cultural boundaries and the commercialized status of contemporary art. He has held solo exhibitions at international institutions including the Kuandu Museum of Fine Arts, Taiwan National University of the Arts, Taipei (2024); Sifang Art Museum, Shanghai (2023); and CCA Berlin (2022). House of Nations was commissioned and produced by Fondazione In Between Art Film for “Penumbra,” an exhibition held at Complesso dell’Ospedaletto, Venice, in 2022. He is represented by SCAI The Bathhouse in Tokyo.