ART INSIGHTS: XU BING IN CONVERSATION

In alignment with our desire to inform and bring about a heightened understanding and interest of contemporary art to students and their community, we will constantly feature a series of articles, videos, podcasts, profiles+works of various local and international contemporary artists that are on the cutting edge of the field. So do keep a look out for our Art Insights periodically.

As a first, here's a feature on Xu Bing, a Chinese artist who has lived and work in New York since 1990. "Xu’s art stems from an alienated relationship to language. His breakthrough installation, “A Book from the Sky” (1987), featured hundreds of beautifully bound books and giant scrolls that arched across ceilings and down walls. The documents contained 4000 unreadable characters -– a new language that Xu had created. The installation puzzled Chinese and international viewers alike. The Chinese approached the texts expecting to find legible writing, while non-Chinese viewers viewed the work as a comment on the artist’s ruptured culture. Xu insists that the project, like all his text-based installations, was not about his personal history at all. Instead, these works express his doubt about cultural authority on the larger level. In the gap that exists between the serious execution and presentation of the books -- which seem like authentic classical volumes -- and the underlying absurdity of the project, the artist points out the disconnection between official and private uses of language." |ArtandCulture|















































Interestingly, how Xu Bing got about to this level of expression in his art owes it back to his childhood. The son of a professor and a librarian, he spent his early years surrounded by books that he could not read. His school years coincided with the Cultural Revolution, when he and other children were sent off to camps to learn Mao’s new official language, which was regularly changed to meet official doctrine. He returned home to his parents only to meet yet another language, now strange to him, and a new culture of control –- to instill discipline, his father made him copy classical Chinese characters every day. For Xu, these characters came to represent the forces of authority rather than a vital link to his ancient culture. As we believe that discipline precedes blessings, its evident that this stringent copying of Chinese characters brought about interesting observations for Xu and to present, a very deep understanding of its propriety to culture and art.

Do check this video out. Its a discussion of Xu Bing with Curator Wu Hong on the topic of his works.