Duration: December 20, 2024 — May 30, 2025

Title: Xu Bing: Where There Is a Question, There Is …

Location: Chengdu Art Museum, Chengdu, Sichuan, China

https://www.cdamuseum.com/exhibition.html#/item?id=109

Words from the Artist

I have been doing art all my life, but in the process, I have lost sight of the scope of art. It is only now that I realize that contemporary art, in fact, has no boundaries. There is no authority that can define what contemporary art is. 

I am drawn to the “uncertainty” of contemporary art precisely because it lacks boundaries. It compels me to keep making, searching, and asking questions. I have discovered that the core motivation behind my artist practice is rooted in my own life energy and my attitudes toward things. I cannot stand to follow a prescribed format. Only subjects that I cannot fully comprehend spark my interest. The motivation to work diligently comes naturally, while I am the most curious about whether the final result matches with my original vision, especially for things that no one has done before, where no one, not even myself, could predict the outcome. After finishing one project, I jump into the next. My art journey continues to unfold this way.

Discerning what project is worth pursuing depends on one’s understanding of the relationship between art and social reality. Moreover, social reality and cultural context are always in flux. New technologies, space exploration, smartphones have all become parts of our current social reality. Today, everyone allocates a portion of their life to their phone. Any change in lifestyle will inevitably be reflected in the way art is expressed.

An artist’s lifelong work is to build an “enclosed circle” of his or her artistic expression. Past artworks are annotations for new works, while new works are a rediscovery of old ones. Meanwhile, the passage of time always create new openings and questions within this “enclosed circle.” The artist, therefore, must seek new methods to mend these openings and address these questions. From this perspective, art-making is an endless endeavor.

This exhibition marks my first and largest exhibition in the Southwest region, which is also my birthplace. Compared to classical art techniques, contemporary art inevitably carries a sense of immaturity. I hope to use this opportunity to share my work with friends and family, and to seek advice and exchanges with colleagues in the art world.

Finally, I would like to express my gratitude to the Chengdu Art Museum and to all the organizations, teams, and individuals who helped this exhibition a reality.

Xu Bing

November 27, 2024

Duration: April 17, 2024 - October 7, 2024

Title: Xu Bing: Art Satellite

Location: Cappella di Santa Veneranda, Venice, Italy

Exhibited Work: Art Satellite

Xu Bing: Art Satellite presents the works produced in Xu Bing's Space Art Residency Program, using Xu Bing's art satellite "SCA-1," launched into space on February 3, 2024. The exhibition takes place in the Cappella di Santa Veneranda, a chapel attached to the Chiesa dei Santi Geremia e Lucia in Venice, Italy. The works in the exhibition utilize space technology to echo the inscription on the exterior of the church: "All’ Italia al mondo implori luce pace" [To bring light and peace to Italy and to the world].

SCA-1 was produced by Xu Bing Studio in collaboration with Beijing WanHoo Space Ltd. Before SCA-1, thousands of satellites hover above us daily: satellites for weather, telecommunication, and intelligence–and yet there was no satellite for art. Thus born the Xu Bing Space Art Residency Program, for which Xu Bing invites artists and creatives from other disciplines to share the usage rights to the satellite and to explore the field that is laden with futurity together, by launching their artistic visions into space.

Xu Bing's Space Art Residency Program can be reached at sca@xubingstudio.cn. 

Exhibited Work:

Satellite Lake: Cosmic Reflections (video and animation stills)

Duration: February 22—July 14, 2024

Title: Xu Bing: Word Alchemy

Location: Asia Society Texas Center, Houston, Texas

https://asiasociety.org/texas/exhibitions/xu-bing-word-alchemy 

Exhibited Work:

Early manuscripts related to language, early sketches, calligraphy copybook, Dunhuang cave sketches, copy of the etching of The Blindness of Tobit by Rembrandt van Rijn, sketch of farmer from Huapen,

Brilliant Mountain Flowers Magazines, 1975 - 1977

Shattered Jade, 1977 - 1983

Book from the Sky, 1981 - 1991, with tools, books, and documentary

Series of Repetitions: Ziliudi, 1987-1988

Square Word Calligraphy Classroom, 1996

Telephone, 1996 - 2006
Landscript, 1999 - ongoing, with drawings, postcards, and sketchbook

Tobacco Project: Little Red Book, Poem from Tang Dynasty, Match Book, and Backbone, 2000 - 2011
Book from the Ground, 2003 - ongoing, with book and video

Book from the Ground: Shenzhen Stories

Magic Carpet, 2006

Mustard Seed Garden Landscape Scroll, 2010

Character of Characters, 2012, with video, preliminary drawings, various images

The Seven-Character Poetry Collection of Small Enterprises, 2015

A.B.C., 2015

Silkworm Book: The Analects of Confucius, Silkworm Book: Little Red Book, 2019, with videos

Xu Bing Tianshu Rocket, 2021-, with satellite model and documentary

Gravitational Arena Animation, 2022

Background Story: Autumn Colors on the Qiao and Hua Mountains, 2023

Square Word Calligraphy: Deep in the Heart of Texas, 2023

Monkeys Grasp for the Moon, 2023

Xu Bing: Word Alchemy assembles more than 50 of Xu Bing’s most important woodcut prints, videos, drawings, installations, and other ephemera representing almost 50 years of the artist’s creative output. Starting with Xu’s early engagements with social realism and Western art historical traditions alike, the exhibition charts the evolution of the artist’s linguistic experiments which challenge and expand not only the history of Chinese landscape painting, but the canons of contemporary art.

Duration: May 22, 2024 - June 29, 2024

Title: A Moment in Time: Xu Bing in Rome

Location: American Academy in Rome, Rome, Italy

Exhibited Work: The Wall and The Road

The Wall (1990-91) is the first rubbing that Xu created, representing a tower of the Great Wall of China, documenting its texture, scale and grandeur. The technique involves covering the ancient surface with a thin layer of plastic, then with a large covering of Xuan paper, and lastly ‘poaching’ it with ink-soaked cotton wads. The rubbing is then gently peeled away from the surface, bearing the imprint of the walls. Realized a few years after the Tiananmen Square protests, The Wall is also a critique of the isolationism of the Chinese state. Shortly after these events, he moved to United States, exhibiting work locally and internationally. While living in New York, Xu’s work moved towards advocating Chinese cultural singularity in its struggle with Western materialism. In 2007 he returned to Beijing as vice president of the Central Academy of Fine Arts, where he began his teaching career nearly 40 years earlier.

The Road is 20 meter long drawing of one section of the Appian Way. Collaborating with art and design students from l’Accademia di Belle Arti and the Istituto Europeo del Design, both based in Rome, he has worked directly on the paving stones, using the same rubbing technique he used 20 years earlier. Bearing the imprint of the Appian Way and retaining the details of the blocks of stones, the lines etched in them are a testimony to centuries of use. For Xu, this technique has a rich historical, biographical and philosophical significance: rubbing contains traces of the past, as a transfer of evidence and revelatory encounter, a collective and collaborative process. Rubbing requires skill and repetition, combining the incremental diligence of the craftsman with a singular, artistic vision.

Exhibited Work:

The Wall (The Great Wall of China, 1988-99)

The Road (The Appian Way, Rome, 2024)

Original work and rubbing of early medieval architectural decoration

Original work and rubbing of inscribed votive altar dedicated to Isis and Sarapis

Duration: May 1, 2024 - August 20, 2024

Title: The Contemporary Logic of "Streams, Mountains and Qingyuan" : Contemporary Ink Lecture Series

Location: Museum of Art Wuhan, China

Exhibited Work: Square Word Calligraphy - Peach Blossom Spring

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.

Duration: June 15, 2024 - September 15, 2024

Title: Illusive Masks

Location: SeeWell International Art Center, Fuzhou, China

Exhibited Work: Panda Zoo

“Face” has always been an element of social reality, and cosmetic surgery is an exchange for a new face. As a result of consumer culture, the mask is a face used in public, fastened on top of the “real image” and deeply engraved with the era brand of artificial masks.

In this work, Xu Bing created an ersatz "authentic" space for gallery visitors to view a well-known symbol of Chinese culture -- the panda bear. Xu Bing's pandas, however, were actually New Hampshire pigs, a breed with natural black-and-white markings similar to those of the panda bear. The artist doctored their appearance with panda masks and let them wander freely inside an elegant "Chinese" enclosure consisting of a bamboo grove against the backdrop of a traditional landscape painting. 

Like a significant number of Xu's works, Panda Zoo explores the implications of the mask, an exploration that extends to his works of invented calligraphy, which the artist describes as ''masked characters.''

Duration: May 1, 2024 - 

Title: Thirty years of Contemporary Art in China and Singapore

Location: Museum of Contemporary Art, Suzhou, China

Exhibited Work: Background Story

Duration: March 6—June 3, 2024

Title: Universal / Remote

Location: The National Art Center, Tokyo, Japan

Link: https://www.nact.jp/english/exhibition_special/2024/universalremote/index.html 

Exhibited Work: Dragonfly Eyes, 2017

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

Duration: January 18, 2024 - Feburary 24, 2024

Title: Inside & outside of a book

Location: Fang suo, Beijing, China

Exhibited Work: Book from the Ground: Grammar