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

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.

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

“Tobacco Project” is an extended project that collects and organizes materials related to tobacco that cannot be easily defined as art or sociology. The project began in 1999 in Durham, home of the Duke family; passed through Shanghai in 2004; and in 2011 extended once more to Virginia — locations closely intertwined with tobacco.

Tobacco is an object that permeates—it pervades all spaces, ends in ashes, and has many different connections with individuals and the world more broadly—in economics, culture, law, morality, faith, fashion, living space, personal interest, and more. Xu Bing is interested in reflecting on the problems and weaknesses of humanity by exploring the long and entangled relationship between humans and tobacco.

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.

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. 

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.” The monumental scroll challenges received notions of nation, history, and identity, posing a daunting question: What do we protect in our history books? The work transforms the Great Wall into a paper edition of itself by shedding its history and context, hinting at ironies of isolationism, migration, and various cultural legacies.

2008

Materials: Carved Stone

Dimension: Varies

Location: Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden, Germany

2008－2009

Medium: mixed media installation/ carved and hand-finished acrylic characters, dye, monofilament

Location: Embassy of the People's Republic of China, Washington, D.C. USA

2003

ABS plastics, stainless steel, electronic components

49 × 42 × 6.5 cm

When Xu Bing began making artwork while living in the West, he discovered that the work of the contemporary artist was not unlike scientific discovery—they both require originality and must benefit humanity. In 2003, Xu Bing designed the interactive installation Ergo Dynamic Desktop. The Chinese title, “Slow-motion Desktop,” describes how the computer’s machine configuration is based on slow-movement ergonomics. The computer and keyboard can only move very slowly in a single direction. When working on this desktop, the user is unwittingly undergoing a slow-motion bodily and visual massage, lowering the risk of computer-related injury. More than an artwork, Ergo Dynamic Desktop is a patented invention for alleviating bodily and visual fatigue.

2004

Location:  Sala La Gallera, Valencia, Spain
Medium: Mixed media installation

...''The Well'' makes use of practically the whole of the ground floor of the venue ''La Gallera'' - a former arena built for cockfights which, after a period when it fell into disuse, was converted into an art gallery and is now a space for special projects of contemporary art. The twelve arches that support the upper floors and flank the central lower space have been blocked off with ''bricks'' of newspapers - as if they were building bricks, irregular slabs of stone - cutting off both physical and visual access to the inside. The public is then forced to go around the outside of this wall and go up to the second floor where it can, and only from here, contemplate the visual scene and spectacle happening on the inside of this kind of well formed by the wall of newspaper... On the bottom of this well, in what was formerly the arena of the cockfights, Xu Bing has placed a covering of natural grass (uneven, worn, and parched in spots, ''to transmit the idea that nobody has entered into this space for a long, long time'') and on it lie the skeletons of fowls, both large and small, some intact, others partially intact with scattered bones, naturally placed, as if time and destiny had scattered them randomly...

-- Rico, Pablo J. ''Xu Bing and the Well of Truth.'' Exhibition Catalog, (La Gallera de Valencia, Spain: 2004). 

Medium: mixed media installation/ cast aluminum

...The towering new creation that cascades from the top of the Elvehjem's Paige Court is a celebration rather than a memorial. "The Glassy Surface of a Lake" (formerly titled "Net") is inspired by a passage in Henry David Thoreau's "Walden," a meditation on the profound purity of an utterly still lake. In the passage, the famous naturalist writer inverts his viewpoint to envision the lake hovering overhead so "you could walk right under it to the opposite hills."
Xu has re-created that vision in the museum: the suspended lake takes the form of the very letters of Thoreau's passage. Thousands of wire-linked aluminum letters hover at the top of the three-story museum court and, in the middle of the "lake," letters tumble down to the first floor. As we gaze up this shaft of metaphorical liquid, what are we meant to see?
In his fresh perspective on the lake, Thoreau envisions the lake as no less than "Earth's eye; looking into which the beholder measures the depth of his own nature." Do we see ourselves mirrored in those watery depths? Can each of us measure our nature in this mirror of nature?
For sure, mirroring definitions of the same word ("nature") reflect the play of words and life - and the urgent need to protect both from poisoning rhetoric. If the thousands of wired-together letters lack the elegance of a still lake, Xu, the Elvehjem staff (and UW-Madison students) have nevertheless produced a marvelous confabulation.

-- Kevin Lynch, ''Xu Bing and The Power of Words.'' The Capital Times, 10 Sept, 2004. 

2003

Materials: Metal cages, motion sensors, fake birds

Location: Beijing, China

2001

Medium: Mixed media installation/ computer monitors

Location: Asia Society, New York, USA

Commissioned as a permanent installation by the Asia Society, New York, this work consists of a series of four flat computer monitors of diminishing size mounted sequentially on a wall at Asia Society headquarters. Words rendered in Xu's invented ''English Square Word Calligraphy'' appear first on the largest monitor. The characters then begin to break apart and move across the first screen, disappearing and then reappearing on the second and third screens in a continuous motion. Arriving at the last screen, the characters reassemble into ordinary English script, revealing a text-book conversation beginning with the phrase ''Excuse me sir, can you tell me how to get to the Asia Society?''

Evoking the phraseology of an elementary English-as-a-second language textbook, Xu's text points to the commonality of experience of new immigrants to the United States. Since the viewers standing in front of Xu's installation are in fact already at the Asia Society, this request for directions implies the deeper existential question of ''Where are we, in reality?'' Experienced within the specific environs of the so-called ''Asia Society New York,'' Xu's work plays with the concept ''I am within you, you are within me'' - the same concept explored in his ''English Square Word Calligraphy.'

2001

Medium: mixed media installation/ silkworm

Location: Eslite Gallery, Taipei, Taiwan

Materials: printed post-its.

This work was created for an exhibition at the Ginza Graphic Gallery in Japan examining the dynamic changes taking place in the book industry in the countries that use Chinese characters in their language systems - Japan, Korea, and China. Xu's work focuses on the idea of language and digitalization. The title of the work is derived from a passage in the classic 15th century Chinese novel Journey to the West, in which the supernatural Monkey, Sun Wukong, does battle with a demon and finds himself losing. Using the magical method of ''shen wai shen'' (which in modern terms could roughly be translated as self-cloning) Monkey takes a strand of his own hair and puts it in his mouth, thereby releasing thousands of miniature replicas of himself that do battle with and defeat the demon. 

Using Chinese, Japanese and Korean, respectively, to write out this passage from the tale, the artist displayed the three versions on separate panels mounted on the wall, with each character inscribed on its own small, square notebook. Audience members were invited to freely tear off sheets of characters, unexpectedly revealing underneath a word written in a different language. This random mixing resulted in a scrambling of languages within one narrative, like different texts jumbled together in a computer error, or the cacophony resulting from different languages being spoken at once. At other times the random mixing of words regained a kind of normalcy and coherence. 

On the back of each sheet of paper was inscribed Xu Bing's personal website address: http://www.xubing.com. One implication of the work is the notion that through Internet technology one can attain something of the magical capacity for self-generation displayed in the story. 

1992

Medium: mixed media installation/ books bound in traditional Chinese and in Western way, tables, chairs

An investigation of the cultural function and meaning of language, this installation combines 300 volumes of books each previously fabricated by Xu Bing. Dubbed ''problem books'' by the artist, these encompass the works Post Testament bound in classical Western style, and Book From the Sky bound in a traditional Chinese manner. While both sets of volumes appear to be traditional, in fact each is a contemporary text designed to be incomprehensible by the reader. The 600 volumes are piled on an enormous reading table measuring 56ft x 12ft, serving as fractured emblems of two cultured systems of knowledge. On the wall above the table is a large sign reading ''QUIET.'' The audience is invited to sit at the table and peruse the books. The contrast of the ordered public reading space, presided over by the warning of QUIET, with the chaos of the information-less books laid on the table in a scattered and turbulent fashion evokes strong cultural implications. 

1993

Medium: Mixed media installation/ Braille books and book covers

This work, the title of which combines the words Braille and illiterate, is comprised of a reading room with a table piled with books. The covers of these books, altered by the artist, feature English titles superimposed over original Braille titles. The English titles are in fact completely different from the Braille ones, and bear no relation to the actual content of the books. Upon opening the books, a sighted member of the audience expecting to find an English text inside finds only pages printed in Braille, the content of which he/she assumes to be that indicated by the English title. Conversely, a blind audience member literate in Braille, unaware of the misleading English title printed on the book, would be unaware that sighted readers had a completely wrong impression of the book's content. The result is that the same object is interpreted by different viewers in completely different ways. Only those both in full capacity of their vision and educated in Braille would be able to comprehend the deception. In this way Brailleliterate evokes issues of cultural bias, misinterpretation and concealment. 

1992－1993

Medium: Installation of printed and bound books with religious and secular texts

Dimension: varies; 35 × 45 × 8cm each book (closed)

This installation is comprised of 300 specially printed and bound volumes titled “Post Testament.” The content of the books is a strange, hybrid text. The King James’ version of the New Testament was combined with a trashy contemporary novel by alternating each word of the two texts. As a result, the only way to read the complete text taken from either book is to skip every other word. Yet, regardless of which narrative the reader is focused on, the visual presence of the other narrative cannot be avoided, creating a visual imprint on the reader’s mind. The hybrid text thus generates a new and abnormal reading pattern. The artist attempts to experiment with the relation between avant-garde literature and visual art.

1986

Materials: Tire, Print, Ink, Paper

A print can be taken from almost any solid surface. In 1986, Xu Bing and his students made "Big Wheel," a print of giant truck tire treads. The exhibition of the tire itself along with the print marked one of the first examples of installation art in Beijing.

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.