Medium: Limited Edition Print

Dimension: 15” X 15”

Date: 2020

Commissioned by the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Xu Bing creates this original artwork to celebrate The Met’s 150th Anniversary. Art for the People for The Met is a six-color lithograph and relief print, which includes two components: Square Word Calligraphy and multiple red “seals” based on ancient Chinese literati tradition. With a closer look, the seals actually turn out to be QR codes that the audience can scan and read further on The Met’s website. The Met has acquired the first edition of the print portfolio. It will be on view beginning September 16, 2021 on the second floor of the Museum in the passageway opposite Galleries 691–693.

Title：Book from the Ground: One Day in Manchester

Exhibition: 2021 Manchester International Festival, Great Britain, 2021

Material: Bronze sculpture with colored patina

Dimension: Male (Feng): 56 ¼ x 13 ½ x 15 inch

                   Female (Huang): 55 ½ x 16 x 21 ¼ inch

Conceived at the time of Xu Bing’s monumental Phoenix Project, 2008-2010, which was exhibited in Beijing, Shanghai, New York and at the 2015 Venice Biennale, the intricate, hand painted Bronze Phoenix, 2016, consists of 500 separate cast and hand-wrought parts. Proud and powerful, a symbol of peace and prosperity, the mythological phoenix (Feng and Huang) foretell  great events. Xu Bing’s Bronze Phoenix has another aspect as well; made up of shovels, wrenches and drill bits – the tools of the worker -  it is a contemporary Phoenix, a representation of  21st century China in all its’ variety, ambition and raw energy.   

Materials: Benches made with salvaged Deer Isle granite,

                 Text from a Poem by Li She (c. 806, C.E.),

                  Caved in Square Word Calligraphy

Location: Forsyth Plaza, Chinatown, New York.

1987－1988

Medium: woodblock print

Dimensions: 22 x 28.5 in. per print

Edition: 50

Materials：Book, Silkworm.

Dimension：1.5 (H) x 52 (L) x 42 (W) cm

2020

Exhibition Location: Asia Society Triennial, New York, U.S.A.

Materials: Natural debris attached to frosted glass panel

2020

Exhibition Location：The 1st Ji'nan Biennial, Shandong Province, China

The artwork for the 2018 vintage label reflects on the illusory splendour of Xu Bing’s series of imaginary Chinese characters. The calligraphy resembles the structure of Chinese characters but is actually composed of the Latin alphabet. With an acute sense of the bonds that unite different cultures, Xu Bing expresses his linguistic creativity in the 2018 label by rewriting the Latin alphabet to create a unique script in which the alphabet is absorbed into the codes of traditional Chinese ideography.

The 2018 label features a coalescence of cultures through the Chinese characters that denote “Mouton Rothschild.” The letters in the artwork are designed by Xu Bing to reveal themselves to the attentive reader one after the other, in the same way that the aromas and flavours of a very fine wine, with patience, are also gradually discovered.

2017

Video, surveillance camera footage taken from public live-streaming websites

81'

trailer

I’ve wanted to make a film from surveillance footage since 2013, but I had no access to the necessary resources. Since 2015, surveillance cameras in China have been linked to the cloud database: countless surveillance recordings have been streamed online. So I took up the project again. I collected a huge amount of footage and tried to use these fragments of reality to tell a story.

With no human agency operating them, surveillance cameras produce fascinating footage round the clock. Ineffably silent, these cameras record incessantly. Sometimes they record images that are beyond logical understanding, captured in one mad, fleeting instant. When these seemingly random yet intricately connected clips are assembled, what's the distance between the video fragments of real life and 'reality'?

—Xu Bing

1987－1991

Medium: Mixed media installation/ hand-printed books and scrolls printed from blocks inscribed with ''false'' characters

This four-volume treatise, produced over four years, was made with thousands of meaningless characters that look like Chinese, each designed by the artist in a Song-style font that was standardized by artisans in the Ming dynasty. For the immersive installation, the artist hard-carved over four thousand moveable type printing blocks. The meticulous, exhaustive production process and the work’s format, arrayed like ancient Chinese classics, were such that audiences could not believe that these exquisite texts were completely illegible. The work simultaneously invites and denies the viewer’s desire to read the work.

As Xu Bing has noted, the false characters “seem to upset intellectuals,” inspiring doubt in received systems of knowledge. Many early viewers pored over the artwork, obsessively looking for real characters. 

2003—ongoing

Xu Bing has been undertaking his Book from the Ground project since 2003. The artist first compiled symbols drawn from the public sphere and wrote a book using only these signs. The book is written in a way that any reader, regardless of his or her cultural or educational background, can understand. As long as one lives within the contemporary society, he or she will be able to interpret the book. Due to the universality of its visual language, it could be published anywhere without translation. For the Book fom the Ground installation, Xu Bing recreated his studio's working environment and brought some materials to the exhibition space, implying that this is a never-ending project in progress. Xu Bing’s studio also made a character database software that corresponds to the language of the book. Users can enter words either in English or in Chinese, and the program will translate them into Xu Bing's lexicon of signs. It thus serves as an intermediary form of communication and exchange between the two languages. As personal computer and the internet become increasingly integrated into daily life, the lexicon of digital icons grows accordingly, and the symbolic language of Book from the Ground has been further updated, augmented, and complicated. In response to his own Book from the Sky, a work dated 30 years earlier whose language is illegible to anyone, Book from the Ground is legible to all. It is an expression of Xu Bing’s long-standing vision of a universal language.

Book From the Ground: From Point to Point can be purchased from various bookstores and websites. 

Indistint forms of plants and stones can be discerned through frosted glass. Eventually an image of a landscape emerges, reminiscent of East Asian painting. There is a passageway between the showcases, allowing a view behind the scenes. Here the visitor sees dry twigs and branches of pine trees, and also decorations mode of simple materials- modeling clay and cotton wool, all held together by sticky tape and fishing line... Finally the visitor is able to see something that would normally be kept hidden at an exhibtion. Behind the walls of the exhibition space there is a maintenance space, with heating pipes and empty shelving. A view from the outside only shows the surface. It is only when we try to find out what is beneath the surface that we can discover the background, and everything becomes intertwined in the image.

For Square Word Calligraphy, Xu Bing designs a calligraphic system in which English words come to resemble Chinese characters. Like a linguistic breeder, the artist combines Chinese calligraphy with English writing to create a new “species.” However, it is different from the nonsense characters in Book From the Sky, which give the viewer a feeling of hesitation, suspicion, and confusion. When reading Square Word Calligraphy, such feeling is joyfully resolved with the sudden revelation that the work does contain “real” text. Thereby into the Western cultural sphere was written a brand new, Eastern art form. Established notions of Chinese and English no longer retain, and perceptual norms are reset, marking the new potentials that challenge the foundation of cognition itself.

After developing this lettering system, Xu Bing created a new installation piece modeled on adult literacy classes within the exhibition space. He also added a textbook, an instructional video, and a practice sheet just like those used in classroom settings. When the audience goes into the gallery, it is as if he or she enters a study space.

1994－1996

Materials: Mixed-media installation; instructional video, model books, copybooks, ink, brushes, brush stands, blackboard

The intention of this installation is to simulate a classroom-like setting modeled on adult literacy classes, in a gallery or museum space. Desks are arranged with small containers of ink, brushes and a copybook with instructions on the basic principles of ''New English Calligraphy,'' a writing system invented and designed by the artist. A video titled ''Elementary Square Word Calligraphy Instruction,' is played on a monitor in the exhibition space, capturing the audiences' attention and inviting them to participate in the class. Once they are seated at the desks, the audience is instructed to take up their brushes and the lesson in New English Calligraphy begins. 

Essentially, New English Calligraphy is a fusion of written English and written Chinese. The letters of an English word are slightly altered and arranged in a square word format so that the word takes on the ostensible form of a Chinese character, yet remains legible to the English reader. As people attempt to recognize and write these words, some of the thinking patterns that have been ingrained in them since they learned to read are challenged. It is the artist's belief that people must have their routine thinking attacked in this way. While undergoing this process of estrangement and re-familiarization with one's written language, the audience is reminded that the sensation of distance between other systems of language and one's own is largely self-induced.

2013

Materials: Mixed media: Stones, Clay, Mist, Light effect, Sounds of bird and insects, LCD screen 

Dimension: Varies

Location: Victoria and Albert Museum, London, UK

2012: 17'

2012, 2015: 15'

Materials: seventeen-minute animated film 

This animation is conceived as a study and imagination of a calligraphy masterpiece by Zhao Mengfu (1254-1322) in the collection of Yahoo’s founder, Mr. Zhiyuan Yang. Through the medium of widescreen animation, The Character of Characters describes the source of the unique character of Chinese people. Everyone in China who has received basic education must, over the course of years, commit to memorize and then write and re-write thousands of characters, each character a drawing. This is the way things have been done over thousands of years in the Chinese history, so this must have had some influence on the formation of the character of Chinese people. It implies the way that Chinese people see and approach things, and why China is the way it is today – developing at this breakneck speed but not in line with the Western value system.

Chinese people’s worldviews and concepts of freedom; the consequences of Chinese people’s flexibility, collectivism, face-saving mentality, moral stance that demands focus on communal interests, and worship of symbols and big names; the ability of Chinese culture to digest other cultures, and the Chinese culture of copying (“shanzhai”). All of these special characteristics could be said to have a deep connection to the Chinese way of writing characters. This animation seeks to reveal the relation between Chinese writing and cultural characteristics, the core and energy of Chinese culture, and its advantages and disadvantages for people to continue to build new modes of human civilization.

 Supported by The Robert H. N. Ho Family Foundation.

2010

Materials: Woodblock print mounted as a handscroll, ink on paper

"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, 2010

The Forest Project is an experiment of creating a self-sustaining system that will move funds from wealthy areas to impoverished areas for planting trees. Its feasibility is based on the following principles: firstly, utilize free online services such as auction and sales hosting, money transfers, and even online teaching to achieve the lowest possible costs; secondly, benefit everyone involved in the project; thirdly, utilize regional economic discrepancies ($2.50 is a subway ride in New York, but it can plant ten trees in Kenya). 

2006

Medium: Handweaved carpet

Dimension: 595 x 595 cm each

For the first Singapore Biennale, Xu Bing created a prayer carpet for the Kwan-Im Temple, the largest Buddhist Temple in Singapore. 

The design of the carpet is similar in concept to Hui Su's Former Qin Dynasty creation the Xuan Ji Tu. In 1620 Hui Su created a grid of 841 characters that can be read in any number of directions and combinations. From this single grid, one can discern nearly 4,000 separate poems. In this fashion, Xu Bing selected passages from four significant faith-based texts (one Buddhist, one Gnostic, one Jewish, and one passage from Marx, all in English translation), which he then transcribed as Square Word Calligraphy, and then synthesized into one text. 

2004

Material: Dust

In this installation Xu Bing uses dust that he collected from the streets of lower-Manhattan in the aftermath of September 11th. In the work, Xu Bing references the fine whitish-grey film that covered downtown New York in the weeks following 9-11, and recreates a field of dust across the gallery floor that is punctuated by the outline of a Zen Buddhist poem, revealed as if the letters have been removed from under the layer: 

As there is nothing from the first,

Where does the dust itself collect?

In the work Xu Bing discusses the relationship between the material world and the spiritual world, exploring the complicated circumstances created by different world perspectives. The dust was applied to the floor with a leaf blower and allowed 24 hours to settle. 

The work won the inaugural Artes Mundi Prize, the Wales International Visual Art Prize in 2004 and was later shown at various venues across the world. 

Landscript, as the title suggests, is “pictures” that Xu Bing intentionally made with “script.”  This project started when the artist went to the Himalayas in Nepal in 1999 and sketched “scenes” with Chinese characters. China has long had a tradition that “calligraphy and painting have the same origins.” Xu Bing’s Landscript, landscape-in-script, transformed the visual images of landscapes to linguistic forms, inviting the viewer to reassess the particularity of Chinese culture hidden in landscape paintings and providing a unique way to “read a scene.”

1999

Materials: Mixed media installation; 

Dimension: 36 x 9 ft (1097.3 x 273.4 cm)

Location: Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1999; Victoria and Albert Musum, London, 2001

Commissioned by the Museum of Modern Art in New York, this work was created for the Museum's ''Project Series,'' a group of monumental banners designed by international artists to be displayed outside the entrance to the museum. Xu emblazoned his eye-catching red-and-yellow banner, measuring 36ft x 9ft, with the slogan ''ART FOR THE PEOPLE: Chairman Mao said'' inscribed in his own invented system of ''New English Calligraphy'' -- English words deconstructed but then re-configured into forms that mimic the square structure of Chinese characters. With its prominent display above the museum entrance, the banner and its slogan served both as a motto for the museum and as a public airing of one of Mao Zedong's most fundamental views on art. Reflective also of the artist's personal conviction that Mao's concept of art for the people is universally relevant; the work exemplifies the way in which Xu integrates his particular cultural background and life experience into the international context of contemporary art. 

1994

Location: Beijing, China

Materials: Performance media installation with live animal / Live Pig, books, mannequin, wood blocks, ink

This work was created as an extension of an earlier project: A Case Study of Transference. A life-sized mannequin in human form, covered in false-character tattoos, was placed inside an enclosure containing a male pig, similarly tattooed. The intention was both to observe the reaction of the pig towards the mannequin and to produce an absurd and random drama -- an intention that was realized when the pig reacted to the mannequin in an aggressively sexual manner. The entire process was documented and the resulting photographs were exhibited several years after the event, in 1998. 

1993－1994

Location：Beijing, China

Medium: Performance, mixed media installation / Ink and live pigs

When this work was initially performed in Beijing, it revealed an unexpected and surprising dynamic between the spectators and the spectacle. Just before the event took place there was some concern that, once confronted with the unfamiliar cultural environment of the exhibition hall, the pigs would become too nervous to perform the crucial act. But in fact the result was just the opposite: the pigs themselves were completely unfazed, and blithely ignoring their human onlookers pursued their lovemaking with great gusto. It was rather the audience members who found themselves in an embarrassing and awkward position. What ultimately was exposed was not any sense of discomfort or displacement on the part of the pigs, but the limitations and the inability to adapt of the human audience. Xu Bing states: ''These two creatures, devoid of human consciousness, yet carrying on their bodies the marks of human civilization, engage in the most primal form of 'social intercourse.' The absolute directness of this undertaking produces a result that is both unthinkable and worth thinking about. In watching the behavior of the two pigs, we are led to reflect on human behavior.'' To the artist, the process of caring for and working with the pigs constitutes ''a kind of ongoing sociological experiment, touching on myriad issues.'' 

1993

Medium: media/found oil paintings, falsified magazine article

The title of this work refers to the Chinese name of a Manhattan street located on the Lower East Side. On this street, the artist salvaged a group of non-representational oil paintings from the garbage, providing the catalyst for this conceptual piece.

''Wu'' in Chinese has various meanings, including both ''misunderstanding'' and ''enlightenment'' in the Chan (Zen) sense. This dichotomy between understanding and misunderstanding is integral to ''Wu Street.'' Xu paired the salvaged paintings with a ''profoundly deep'' article by a critic interpreting the abstract paintings of the renowned artist Jonathan Lasker. Xu's intention was to demonstrate his feeling that the critic's opaque interpretation of Lasker's works could just as well be applied to the salvaged works. As a next step, Xu altered the critical text by substituting the real names and art works with false names and illustrations of the found paintings. He then hired a professional translator to translate the altered text into Chinese, making it even more incomprehensible, and subsequently published the falsified, translated article in a prestigious art magazine in China under the pseudonym of Jason Jones. On the surface, Wu Street appears to be no more than an elaborate practical joke; yet it poses serious questions concerning the contemporary art system, the often arbitrary nature of critical language and the basis for assessing the value of art. 

1990－1991

Medium: Mixed media installation/ ink rubbings on paper with stones and soil

Dimension: Central part approx. 31(L) x 6(W) m; Side part approx. 13(H) x 14(W) m each

In 1990, Xu Bing decided to realize a longstanding vision: to “make rubbings of some massive natural object.” At the time, he had an idea: any textured object could be transferred onto a two-dimensional surface as a print. After much preparation, in May Xu Bing and some friends, students, and local residents set off for the Jinshanling section of the Great Wall, where they spent a little less than a month making rubbings of three sides of a beacon tower and a portion of the wall itself. This was the last major artwork that the artist started before moving to the United States in 1990, where it was exhibited for the first time. That the work was born “in-transit” gives it an extra layer of meaning: “Those American printers were shocked by the piece’s size,” Xu noted.

The title Ghost Pounding the Wall is translated from Gui Da Qiang (“a wall built by ghosts”), a Chinese aphorism meaning to be stuck in one’s own thinking, refering to a story of a man trapped behind labyrinthine walls built by ghosts. The epithet was hurled at Xu Bing by viewers who found Book of the Sky incomprehensible. Xu Bing had no quarrel with this criticism, and used it as the title of this work—a play on words, as the word for “build” can also mean “pound.” 

1986－1987

Medium: woodblock print

1987 marks the year Xu Bing’s artistic practice took a decisive turn towards conceptualism. When Xu Bing began his graduate studies, he became interested in printmaking as an indirect form of drawing, as well as the element of repetition that characterizes the medium. For his graduation exhibition, he showed Five Series of Repetitions as well as his “Stone Series” of copperplate prints. Later in the same year, he organized his personal views on printmaking and creative insights into an essay entitled “A New Exploration and Reconsideration of Pictorial Multiplicity.” In it, he wrote, “Multiple, prescribed impressions are the crucial element that differentiates printmaking from other fine arts, and it is only by following this line of inquiry that one can seek out printmaking’s essence.” This set of works represents an experiment in the artistic qualities that make prints unique. He begins by printing an uncut block of wood, making a sequence of prints as he carves until the image is entirely effaced. The entire mark-making process is then transferred onto a ten-meter-long stretch of bark paper. The image thus transitions from a formless solid block of black, and through a complicated process arrives at formless solid block of white, a gesture with a strong Zen Buddhist implication. This progression, from nothing to something to nothing again, anticipates the artist’s desire, stated later in his career, to “make something useless”—to push the medium of woodcutting, and the “usefulness” of figurative arts, into new territory. Five Series also anticipates his later explorations of visual culture and materiality.

1980

Medium: woodblock print

1977－1983

Medium: woodblock print

In 1977, Xu Bing passed his entrance exams to enroll in the Printmaking Department of the Central Academy of Fine Arts. There, he began a series of woodblock prints based on the theme Shattered Jade. There are around 150 pocket-sized works in this set of woodblock prints. They are characteristic of a certain style in Xu Bing’s early works, and they can be seen as a starting point in his artistic inspiration. They express a certain nostalgia for his time in the countryside when he was working in the arts community there, for the pure and simple village life.

2011

Materials: Cut and painted acrylic 

Location: The Morgan Library & Museum, New York, USA

2002

Materials: Mixed media; plastics, laser inscriptions and spray paint 

Location: Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art, Cornell University, Ithaca, New York, USA 

2001

Materials: Cut and painted acrylic

Location: Arthur M. Sackler Gallery, Smithsonian Institution, Washington D.C., USA

The work is mainly comprised of over 400 calligraphic variants of the Chinese character “niao”, meaning bird, carved in colored acrylic and laid out in a shimmering track that rises from the floor into the air. On the gallery floor Chinese characters in the “simplified style” script popularized during the Mao era are used to write out the dictionary definition for niao. The bird/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 “de-evolve” from the simplified system to standardized Chinese text and finally to the ancient Chinese pictograph hasde upon a bird’s actual appearance. At the uppermost point of the installation, a flock of these ancient characters, in form of both bird and word, soar high into the rafters toward the upper windows of the space, as though attempting to break free of the words with which humans attempt to categorize and define them.

The colorful, shimmering imagery of the installation imparts a magical, fairy-tale like quality. Yet the overt simplicity, charm and ready comprehensibility of the work has the underlying effect of guiding the audience to open up the “cognitive space” of their minds to the implications of, and relationships between, word, concept, symbol and image.

The idea for this installation came from a Chinese saying “monkeys grasp the moon” which alludes to an old folk tale about a group of monkeys who tried to capture the moon. Viewing the reflection of the moon on a pool of water from their place on the branch of a tree, the monkeys decided to link their arms and tails together to touch what they thought was the real moon. When at last they touched the moon, it vanished in the ripples of the water. This fanciful yet instructive tale reminds us that what we strive to achieve may in fact be an illusion. 

A chain of monkeys formed out of word shapes. Each link in the chain is a word for “monkey” in a different language (21 languages in total), including Hindi, Japanese, French, Spanish, Hebrew and English.