【Now exhibiting】Xu Bing: Art Satellite
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)
Xu Bing: Word Alchemy
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.
A Moment in Time: Xu Bing in Rome
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
【Now exhibiting】The Contemporary Logic of "Streams, Mountains and Qingyuan" : Contemporary Ink Lecture Series
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.
【Now exhibiting】Illusive Masks
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.''
【Now exhibiting】Thirty years of Contemporary Art in China and Singapore
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
Universal / Remote
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