XU BING

Biography

Xu Bing was born in Chongqing, China in 1955 and raised in Beijing. He enrolled in the Printmaking Department of the Central
Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing in 1977, completed his studies in 1981, and later joined the faculty. He went on to earn a master's
degree from the same institution in 1987. In recognition of his accomplishments, he was invited to the United States as an honorary
artist in 1990. Xu Bing's career has been marked by a variety of notable achievements. In 2007, he returned to China and assumed
several leadership roles at the Central Academy of Fine Arts, including Vice President, professor, and supervisor of doctoral students.
Since 2014, he has served as the head of the institution's Academic Committee. Currently, he divides his time between Beijing and New
York, where he lives and works.

Xu Bing's work has been displayed in numerous prestigious venues around the world, including the Museum of Modern Art and the
Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the Guggenheim Museum, and the Sackler National Gallery in Washington, D.C. His work
has also been exhibited at the British Museum, the Victoria and Albert Museum, and the Museo Reina Sofia, as well as the Joan Miró
Foundation. Additionally, he has participated in several international exhibitions, including the Venice Biennale, Sydney Biennale, São
Paulo Biennale, and Johannesburg Biennale.

Xu Bing has been the recipient of several esteemed awards throughout his illustrious career. In 1999, he was granted the MacArthur
Fellowship for his exceptional originality, creativity, personal direction, and significant contributions to society, particularly in the
domains of printmaking and calligraphy. In 2003, he was honored with the 14th Fukuoka Asian Cultural Award in Japan for his
noteworthy contribution to the advancement of Asian culture. In his acceptance speech, Okwui Enwezor lauded Xu Bing as an artist
who transcends cultural boundaries, bridging the divide between East and West and expressing his thoughts and realities in a visual
language. Additionally, he won the first Artes Mundi Prize in Wales in 2004, and the lifetime achievement award from the Southern
Graphics Council in 2006. In 2010, Columbia University awarded him an honorary Doctorate of Humane Letters, while in 2015, he
received the Andrew D. White Professor-at-Large from Cornell University and the Medal of Arts from the U.S. Department of State.
XU BING INTERVIEW
 SUMMARY OF HIS ART

For Xu Bing there is no true boundary between language and art, between the written word
and the drawn image, nor between the past and present that does not beg to be explored. This
might not seem unusual, as the relationship between calligraphy and ink painting goes back
well over a millennium in the Chinese tradition. However, it is not simply an investigation of
the calligraphic stroke that intrigues the internationally recognized artist, but how each
tradition provides a means to transmit ideas and knowledge that the artist actively
investigates. When he exhibited Book from the Sky in 1988, the audience was both in awe of
his dedication to the 4,000 laboriously carved, seemingly traditional characters of text on
hanging scrolls and in books, and astonished to realize that characters were entirely fictional.
Since then, Xu Bing has continued to exploit the viewers expectations, by merging Roman
letters and Chinese Script, using characters as a means to draw the landscape, and tracing the
evolution from the pictographic origins of the Chinese written language to its breaking point,
in the form of Chairman Mao's Simplified Chinese characters. In doing so, the artist forces the
viewer to confront how meaning is generated and consumed through language, to consider not
only the message, but the vehicle through which it is disseminated.

Xu Bing Art, Bio, Ideas | TheArtStory

 Bronze Phoenix (Feng and Huang) have landed on this Mezzanine Gallery of the Crow Museum of
BRONZE PHOENIX Asian Art. These mythical beasts, created by the internationally renowned artist Xu Bing (b. 1955
Chongqing, China) represent an important story in Chinese folklore and a story we need to hear
right now. Each element and resplendent color is charged with symbolism. With no blueprint to
follow, Xu Bing was given the freedom to do as he liked–to create a phoenix for his time. In 2016, Xu
Bing drew inspiration from his monumental phoenix sculpture in creating Bronze Phoenix (Feng
and Huang) featured in this catalogue. This intricate sculpture was created through the traditional
lost wax process. Consisting of 500 separately cast and hand-wrought parts, it is built from the tools
of the worker: wrenches and shovels cover the wings, drill bits form extended beaks, and hard hats
create a majestic crown. Industrial tubing decorates the bodies and ribbons that demarcate Chinese
construction sites billow in a fanfare of trailing feathers.

“Each piece of Bronze Phoenix is hand-painted,” Xu Bing says, “It is like a relic that was just
discovered from an archaeological site: the coloration has worn, but after wiping away the dust, the
colors shine again, bringing out the inner beauty of the sculpture. My special treatment of color was
inspired from Degas’ sculptures; its subtlety combines perfectly with the color of the bronze itself.”

In addition to the 2016 Bronze Phoenix this exhibition presents five examples of works from our
Chinese jade collection celebrating the powerful phoenix. Within the contrast of time, materials and
message, the strength of the beloved phoenix rising is present in each work, whether made in 1800
two hundred years later. Like the phoenix, through pandemic, climate change and all the challenges
we face as humans, we are reminded of our power of resiliency and our capacity to show up to a
brighter future.
Art-Making of the Bronze Phoenix
The installation features two monumental birds fabricated entirely from materials harvested from construction sites in urban China,
including demolition debris, steel, beams, tools, and remnants of the daily lives of migrant workers.

The materials were gathered by the migrant laborers themselves, who worked on a construction site. It is easy to notice the elements of
the creatures’ work form as you walk around the exhibition space. You will see the jackhammers and shovels connected to hard hats
hoses, beams, and other cast-off materials.

The internally illuminated 12-ton birds were suspended mid-air, dwarfing viewers. The male Phoenix Fang measures 90 feet long, while
the female Huang reaches 100 feet in length, beak to (steel) tail feathers. It took Xu two years to collect and assemble. The whole
project’s engineering is something that most people would term as impressive as the work itself.

Inspiration
In an interview, Xu gave a clear picture of how Phoenix’s while idea came to pass. He said that in 2008 he was commissioned to create a
permanent sculpture. This sculpture would be a formal atrium of the World Finance Centre in Beijing as designed by Cesar Pelli. Xu went
to the construction site and was shocked by the kind of labor and the working conditions. This made him extremely uneasy. He was
struck by the reality of the impressive high rises built for the rich and how the lower and middle classes made them.

Now Xu got the idea to use debris and the dirt to make something that would merge the good and bad, the rich and the poor. Phoenix
was the responses to the unseen labor and the harsh working conditions which he thought were typified in the flawed edges of the
sculptures’ form.

Phoenix Rising: Xu Bing and the Art of Resilience – Crow M What is Xu Bing’s gigantic Phoenix project? - Public Delivery
useum
Tobacco Project
Xu Bing, one of China’s most acclaimed contemporary artists, is known especially
for his exploration of language. In Tabacco Project he furthers that interest,
presenting the culture of tobacco as a far-reaching system of sign and symbols. Using
tobacco as both the subject and object the exhibition includes Xu Bing’s adaptation
of the historical text and graphics: a book made of whole tobacco leaves and printed
with an early-seventeenth-century account of Jamestown, Virginia; a poem composed
from historical tobacco brand names and printed on cigarette paper; and Chinese
cigarettes printed with selection from Quotation from Chairman Mao Tse-Tung ( the
“Little Red Book” ).

Tobacco engages Xu Bing on many levels simultaneously, allowing him to raise

question, make new discoveries, and expand the viewers awareness. Above all, he
sees it as a medium of cross-cultural exchange, one that first linked Virginia and the
American colonies to Europe and other parts of the world in the age of discovery and
which continues to provide a connective thread in the age of globalism. In addition,
he appreciates tobacco’s unique formal properties. Tobacco Project appeals to the
sense of smell as well as sight, and Xu Bing is conscious of permeating the gallery
with the rich, sweet odor of tobacco. He also makes pieces that embody tobacco’s life
cycle, from leafy and green to brittle and brown to smoke and ash. Other works
feature the materials and paraphernalia associated with tobacco consumption,
including pipes, papers, matches, and ashtrays. Tobacco Project contains elements of
sociology, history, politics, and personal narrative, but ultimately it is an artist’s take Xu Bing: Tobacco Project | The Aldrich Contemporary
in tobacco, a subject that fascinates Xu Bing for its history of innovation as much as Art Museum
for its exploitation and self-contradiction.
Living Word Xu Bing: The Living Word | The Morgan Library & Museum

Reflection on language and the nature of writing has been at the core of Xu Bing's art
since the beginning of his career in China during the mid-1980s. It is therefore
particularly fitting that the Morgan, a library as well as a museum, should present his
spectacular installation, The Living Word, a poetic evocation of the relationship between
the written word and its meaning.

"In The Living Word," Xu Bing explained, "the dictionary definition of niao (bird) is
written on the gallery floor in the simplified text created by Mao. The niao characters
then break away from the confines of the literal definition and take flight through the
installation space. As they rise into the air, the characters gradually change from the
simplified text to standardized Chinese text and finally to the ancient Chinese pictograph
for 'bird.' The characters are rainbow colored to create a magical, fairy-tale quality.“

The elegance of the shimmering characters that gradually metamorphose into birds as
they ascend masks the subversive nature of the work. While the modern, simplified
Chinese characters are fixed to the floor, their form and meaning set, earlier forms of
scripts embody an increasing sense of freedom as one moves back in time from
traditional calligraphy to the original pictographs based on images of nature. Xu Bing
said that he chose the bird to suggest "escaping the confines of human written definition."
Gravitational Arena

Stretched by gravity, this sky-dimming Square Word Calligraphy reaches the

ground. While creating a distorted textual space, it simultaneously immerses the
viewers into an interplay between “seeing” and “reading”.

The initial challenge of “seeing” arises when viewers position themselves beneath
the work. In addition to the reversed text, the contortions and overlaps render the
characters in the exhibition hall difficult to read. Simultaneously, the mirror on the
floor embeds the text into a warped wormhole model which interconnects the two
inverted spaces. While the reversed characters become legible in the mirror image,
the audience is still unable to see the work in its entirety. The combination of the
installation and the museum space seems to present a theatrically inviting quality.
Art-making of Gravitational Arena

The flat texts are stretched and pulled from the third and fourth
floors of the museum, dipping all the way to the base level, visually
penetrating through the giant mirror surface on the base level where
the texts also physically conjoin. The artistic language of the work
organically embraces and engulfs the vertical open space unique to
the museum, making the latter its own.

In truth, this entire installation stands as a physical instantiation

of “optical illusion”: one is habituated to reading and writing
text on a flat surface, while the spatial protraction of the text
withdraws from the viewpoint in the opposite direction. In the
transition from 3D to 2D, there is an inherent contestation at
play presupposed by linear perspective, activating the work in a
constant oscillation between its own form and the viewing
perspective, propelling the search for an ideal perspective to
impossible heights, exceeding the physical confines of the
museum. It can only inhabit conceptually.
Where Does the Dust Itself Collect?

In this work, Xu Bing discusses the relationship between the material world and the spiritual world, exploring the complicated
circumstances created by different world perspectives.
Art-Making of Where Does the Dust Itself Collect?

For context, Xu Bing was living in New York at the time. He had witness the destruction from his studio window. He gathered
the dust from the aftermath of that horrific event. He didn't know what to do with it at that time, but he felt like he needed some
way to process the meaning of so much loss for those living in the early part of the first decade of the 21st century. He used his
daughter's doll as a cast to make a baby model for this work.
XU BING'S BACKGROUND STORY SERIES

Background Story begins with a canonic work of Chinese brush painting taken as the template for a contemporary reworking.
In the case of Background Story: Summer Mountains, the original painting was created by Dong Yuan (circa 934-962). Using
the illusion of the appearance of things, with Background Story Xu Bing refers to the art of Belgian artist René Magritte
(1898-1967) as to ancient Chinese philosophers like Laozi or Zhuangzi. What we see is not a landscape. When one walks
around to the back of the free-standing form of the lightbox, the meaning of the background story is revealed. Here, behind
the scene, Xu Bing’s stage is hung with a chaotic web of materials, natural, manmade, all incidental, waste elements that are
recycled and put to extraordinarily effect within the illusion. Background Story is a work of shadow play, a work of magic
where Xu Bing is the magician who creates an illusion and shows you how the trick is done, whilst pointing to issues of
environmental concerns and cultural aesthetics.
Art-making of Xu bing's background story

"In 2004, I was installing an exhibition at the East Asian Art Museum in Germany. During the Second
World War, 90 percent of the collection was moved to the former Soviet Union by the Soviet Red Army.
Only some photos of the lost artwork are left. I hope to use the large glass showcases surrounding the
existing space to create a new work that combines local history and my cultural background. I saw the
potted plants behind the frosted glass wall in the office area of the airport during a connecting flight, which
looked like a smudged Chinese painting. At this time, I thought of the large glass cabinets of the museum
and the missing art pieces and got the inspiration for Background Story."
Book From The Sky

This set of four books forms part of an eponymous

installation first displayed in Beijing in 1988. The
books contain four thousand invented characters that
cannot be decoded, raising fundamental questions
about the Chinese identity and its relationship to the
written word. The artist believes that writing is the
“essence of culture.” His subversion of it speaks to
our need to communicate and the dangers of
distorting or eliminating intended meaning.

Born in Sichuan Province, Xu Bing studied printmaking at the

Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing. Book from the Sky
and other projects have brought him considerable international
renown. He moved to the United States in 1990 but returned to
China in 2008 to teach at his alma mater.
Art-making of A Book From The Sky

Initially, Xu himself typeset sample pages, and took them for printing to a factory in the village of Hanying
(simplified Chinese: 韩营 ; traditional Chinese: 韓營 ), in Caiyu township (Chinese: 采育 ).

Book from the Sky is composed of some 4,000 invented characters that have the appearance of
Chinese characters but are totally unreadable. The woodblock printed characters are printed in
four fascicles with thread-stitched binding, blue paper covers, and ink and paper titleslips.
Mustard Seed Garden Landscape Scroll, Xu Bing, "The Section of Experimental Art at
the 16th National Art Exhibition"

Painting Manual of the Mustard See Garden is a classic textbook for traditional Chinese
painting, and it standardizes, calculates and summaries models of traditional Chinese painting
methods for later followers, and it is a great summary of painting techniques. It represents the
essence of Chinese painting, as it sets up the fundamental differences between Chinese and
Western paintings.
In Chinese paintings, the relationship between writing and drawing is the one between signs
and visual icons. Manual of the Mustard See Garden is a book that best illustrates this
relationship. In the artist’s view, the Manual functions as a dictionary of painting, a collection
of visual sign to describe the world.
Art-making of Mustard Seed Garden Landscape Scroll, Xu Bing, "The Section of
Experimental Art at the 16th National Art Exhibition"

"I created this work upon an invitation from Museum of Fine

Arts, Boston. By cutting, reorganizing, and printing motifs
from the Mustard Seed Garden Manual of Painting (1679), I
created a handscroll version of the classic manual. I believe
that a core characteristic of Chinese painting is its
schematized nature, which is reflected in classic literature,
theatrical expression, and various methods of social
production. The Mustard Seed Garden Manual of Painting is a
dictionary of signs for representing the myriad things of the
world. Through The Mustard Seed Garden Landscape Scroll,
I attempt to investigate and reveal the relation between the
Chinese way of thinking and the semiotic and schematized
nature of Chinese culture." - Xu Bing
Series of Repetitions

From 1986 to 1987, Xu Bing became intrigued with the concept of the print as an "indirect
painting,” and its special quality of "multiplicity." Five Series of Repetitions, which he started in
1986, took multiplicity as its conceptual starting point. Xu released this work, along with the
copperplate print Stone Series. Later in the same year, he gathered his thoughts and creative
experiences on printing in the article, "New Explorations and re-recognition of Multiplicitous
Painting."

In writing, Xu expresses how “multiple, standardized copies are the key characteristic that sets
printing apart from other forms of painting.” According to Xu, by following this thread, one can
discover the unique qualities of print art. In his essay, he analyzes Western contemporary art,
offering critiques of artists such as Andy Warhol (1928-1987). He believes that printing has a
stronger connection to modern art than other painting categories, characterized by its intimacy and
directness. Printing, with its replicability, embodies a modern aesthetic.
Art-making of Series of Repetitions

Series of Repetitions, a suite of ten woodcuts, was part of Xu

Bing’s master’s thesis project in 1987. He printed images in
different stages, each time carving away a little more of the
block’s surface. The first print is the darkest; the final one is
the lightest, with the image being entirely effaced.

The above is one of the series of 12 prints using a reduction

technique. Instead of overprinting with each successive block, so
as to build up a layered image, Xu Bing here prints the blocks in a
sequence, starting with the uncut block and ending with a blank
piece of paper. The sequence of prints shows the undeveloped
land, represented by the uncut block, gradually being turned into
crop fields, becoming lighter and lighter as more is cut away, and
until blank spaces start to appear, and then disappearing altogether
into blank space, presumably into building plots.