2021-2022

Media: Mixed media

Dimension: 145x100x2.4cm x 8

Exhibition: Mirroring the Heart of Heaven and Earth—Ideals and Images in the Chinese Study, The Palace Museum Meridian Gate (Wu men)，Beijing

One wish of mine since 2004 was to create a book that can be understood by all human beings using public signs. It’s been more than a decade since the start of this project, but it is nowhere near ending, and keeps evolving. With the age of globalization, and the now emerging globalization of “graphic expression” brought by the digital computation, new modes of expressions such as emojis and memes adored by the new generation are now making their appearances in the main exhibition hall of the Palace Museum—signs that appear to bear no association to ancient traditions. The audience might find it hard to adjust to the translation of 《兰亭集序》in emojis and memes, but the sense of alienation produces is vital to the intention of this work—to supply regular modes of thinking with a new “elements”. In this way can we better understand both our traditional and contemporary cultures.

 “Wujing Cuishi” (A Room Assembling Five Classics) in today’s language means the “Library”. The ancient Chinese are experts at using images to express their comprehensions of items of complexity—looking at images is reading texts. “Shu Hua Tong Yuan”(Writing and drawing bear the same root) in my understanding is less a note on style but more an indication for semiotics. The way Chinese write the character “Shan” (mountain) is the same with which they draw a mountain. Despite the technics of signification, hieroglyphs, and coreference in modern Chinese, its hieroglyphic constituents still form the genetic core of this language. When we read the word “门” (door), we see the image of a door. If we bolt the door, adding a rod/stroke on it, then we have“闩”(latch). When we write the character “囧”(undesirable distress), aren’t we already drawing an emoji?

I often feel a sense of gratitude, to be able to witness the fact that we are still communicating in a mode as ancient as pictures and images as we step into the era of cyberpunk and the space age. It feels like time travel, living in this conjuncture, feeling that life itself is being stretched across time and space. It is not quite accurate when we say we are entering the age of image—we’ve been doing this for the past thousands of years. Today, so much of our everyday life is lived in the scope of the cellphone. It is our portable library and museum; and the first thing that occurs when we turn it on is to read the signs. 

My expressive sensitivity to signs is derived from the genetics of reading images carried in my body. It is in our tradition, and it works best when activated/animated. 

Related Link：

Text Control：https://mp.weixin.qq.com/s?__biz=MjM5Njg5ODA4OA==&mid=2247485023&idx=1&sn=25c1441184afa62a0ed683cf264418aa&chksm=a6e372189194

fb0e2ff59b461516abdbc915276df0ce2bd8ff3159ec30eb24b74721f64a3a6e#rd

2021-2022

Medium: Mixed media installation

Dimension：25.5x15.7x15.7m

Exhibition：Museum of Art Pudong, Shanghai. 

This installation art is founded on the law of perspective, but it does not end with visuality.

Stretched by gravity, this sky-dimming “Square Word Calligraphy” reaches to the ground. While creating a distorted textual space, it simultaneously puts the viewers into a tension between “seeing” and “reading”.

Problem regarding “seeing” first arises when viewers stand underneath the work. In addition to the reversed text, the contortions and overlaps make the characters in the exhibition hall even harder to read. Meanwhile, the mirror on the floor embeds the text into a huge “wormhole model” that interconnects the two inverted spaces. It is not hard to find that the reversed characters become legible in the mirror image, but the audience in this space still cannot see the entire work. The combination of the installation and the museum space seems to present a theatrically inviting quality. As viewers go to higher floors and their viewing perspective switches, the distorted characters gradually appear normal. From the top floor, the viewers can finally see the front of the characters, but remain unable to read the text in its entirety. Where lies this work’s ideal perspective?

In fact, the whole installation is comparable to a giant “optical illusion” model: people are used to reading words written on a flat surface, so when words are stretched in space, the ideal viewing perspective is being pushed further conversely. As the three-dimensional is converted to the two-dimensional, the law of perspective inherently builds a wrestling relationship. The interaction between the form of the work and the viewing point compels the ideal viewing perspective to an unreachable height outside the museum. This perspective only exists conceptually.

       The law of perspective exists because of the limitation that human sight cannot be bent, while in this work, this limitation itself becomes a kind of “material”. The law of perspective is a kind of language through which we describe the world. Like all other languages, it serves as an intermediary between our thinking and the outside world. There must be blind spots in our thinking since it is shaped by various languages. (Or, As thinking is shaped by various languages, blind spots exist outside of linguistic demonstrations.)

The Square Word Calligraphy contained in this work is transcribed from an excerpt by philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein. Whereas it appears to be an analysis of several visual experiments, this passage actually points to a common misunderstanding in human cognition. Wittgenstein believes that people are used to summarize concepts with logic and systematically understand the world through clarifying concepts. In reality however, this practice keeps us away from real parts of the world. Just like what’s going on in the present world, the tension between civilizations seems to be fundamentally derived from dislocations and differences in human perspectives. An arena full of tensions and gravitations is thereby created. The characters, distorted by space, fall into a chaos of illegibility in which every single element points to an “ideal perspective” suspended (or hanging) outside the exhibition hall. As if all the chaos in the world stems from an unknown purpose. Unseen but exists.

2000

Medium: Neon, stage smoke

Size: Variable

Exhibition: The Tobacco Project: A Series of Installations Created by Xu Bing, The Duke Homestead &  Tobacco Museum, and The Perkins Library Gallery, Duke University, Durham, North Carolina，USA, 2000

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.

Male Feng, MASS MoCA, 2012

2008－2016

The magnificent installation of Xu Bing's Phoenix, a pair of two Chinese phoenixes (feng and huang), is in fact made from thousands of abandoned materials and workers' daily necessities that Xu Bing collected from construction sites in Beijing. While Feng Huang are traditionally associated with rebirth after suffering and rising from ash, Xu Bing's Phoenix can be seen to signify the cycle of the painstaking development and renewal that is inherent in the process of urbanization. Furthermore, Phoenix pays humble respect to the efforts of ordinary workers and draws attention to urban topics such as environmental issues and labor conditions.

When Phoenix traveled to Shanghai (2010), MASS MoCA (2012), New York (2014), and the 56th Venice Biennale (2015), audience from all over the world was not only impressed by the splendor of the two birds but also moved by the countless scars and hopes carried by them.

2008

Materials: Carved Stone

Dimension: Varies

Location: Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden, Germany

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.

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 from 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. 

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.

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. 

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

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 ''Square Word 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.” 

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.

1991

Materials: Unglazed terracotta installation/woodblock

The theme of this work is the awkwardness encountered in linguistic exchange between different cultures. It is comprised of thirty-eight ceramic cubes that represent a sort of transliteration from the twenty-six letters of the Roman alphabet to Chinese characters. The characters that have been chosen are such that, when pronounced, render sounds equivalent to the Roman letter they represent. The Chinese characters are carved on the upper face of each ceramic block in the form of a printer's stamp and the Roman letter is printed on the side of the block. For example, the English letter 'A' is rendered by the Chinese 'ai,' which means sadness. 'B' is rendered 'bi,' which means land on the other side, on the other shore. Some letters need two or three Chinese characters to 'transliterate.' For example, 'W' is rendered 'da', 'bu,' 'liu,' which mean big, cloth and six, respectively. This activity may begin with a becoming logic, but ultimately it leaves its subject, transliterated language, virtually meaningless and almost ridiculous. 

1986

Materials: Tire, Ink, Paper

A print can be taken from almost any solid surface. In 1986, Xu Bing and his colleagues made Big Tire, 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.

2003

Materials: glass, air

Air Memorial is a glass bubble containing air from Beijing during the height of the SARS epidemic. On the surface of the capsule is inscribed, “Beijing Air, April 29, 2003,” one of the days that the greatest number of SARS related death were reported in Beijing.

Location: Guangzhou, China
Materials: Donkeys

The idea for this installation came from a newspaper article about peasants in Southern China who disguised normal horses as zebras to attract tourism. Xu Bing saw how this story exemplifies the kind of creativity and intelligence brought forth by recent developments in China's economic policies. The installation itself merely re-creates this borrowed wisdom of the masses. Similar to Xu Bing's language-based works, this project deals with the concept of masks. The zebras appear in camouflage, so while the viewer encounters a familiar face, what is perceived is inconsistent with its reality. 

1998

Location：Jack Tilton Gallery, New York, USA

Materials: Mixed medIa installation / Live pigs, bamboo, classical paintings

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.''

1998

Medium: Site-specific installation

Materials: Iron leash with character links, live sheep

A long iron chain extends from the exhibition hall to the green lawn outside of the museum. A white sheep is leashed at the end. The chain is connected by the words from a poem by John Berger. 

The piece was exhibited at NY PS1 the same year, and the chain of words stretched from the second-floor gallery to the garden on the rooftop.

1997

Location: Tarble Arts Center, Charleston, Illinois, USA

Materials: Mixed media installation / Metal fence, live sheep

The artist has created two versions of this installation. In the 1997 version, two huge nets were constructed of aluminum wire, the "links" of which that had been woven into word shapes. One net was installed at the entrance to the exhibition gallery, effectively blocking it off, and turning the gallery into a kind of giant trap. The second was installed in the middle of the gallery, dividing the space in half. Fenced in on one side were two live sheep, while the audience was fenced in on the other: the two sides were thus forced to stare at each other through a net of words. The content of the nets' "wire words" was comprised of personal observations of the individuals who aided the artist in the net's construction. As for the inclusion of the sheep in the installation, Xu Bing states that he works with sheep because ''I like the way they stare at things.''

The second version of this work was created in 1998. In this case a large square-shaped net was installed outside the exhibition hall. The wire words of the net comprised of the text of the foreword to the exhibition catalogue written by Linda Weintraub, one of the exhibition curators. 

1994

Location: Beijing, China

Materials: Performance, mixed media installation / Live parrot 

For this performance art work Xu Bing trained a parrot to communicate certain sentiments to gallery audiences. For the duration of the exhibition, the parrot sat alone in its cage in the exhibition hall and quoted learned phrases, such as:

You people are so boring!

Modern art is crap!

Why are you holding me prisoner, you bastards!

Location: Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Richmond, Virginia, USA
Medium: Mixed media installation/ Tobacco leaves, live tobacco plants, various tobacco related materials

A site-specific continuation of the Tobacco Project series, a project investigating the long and entangled relationship between human and tobacco.

After executing the project in Durham (2000) and Shanghai (2004), Xu Bing brought it to another important city related to tobacco: Richmond, Virginia, home of Philip Morris and mother company of teh famous Marlboro cigarette brand. During the residency, he studied tobacco's intimate relationship with the American continent and its early immigrant history. In addition to Tobacco Book, Traveling Down the River, 1st Class (another "tiger-skin carpet" composed of over 500,000 "First Class" brand cigarettes), and many works created for the first two phases of Tobacco Project, he expanded his art project on tobacco inlcuding print works. These works raised profound questions about history and reality, global capital, cultural immersion, and labor market.

Selected work description: 

Backbone, 2011

It is a book composed of early tobacco brand designs that Xu Bing collected in Virginia. He then asked his friend Rene Balcer, a writer, director, and filmmaker, to write a blues poem incorporating tobacco brand slogans. It is titled Backbone after an early brand of tobacco. 

Location: Shanghai Gallery of Art, Shanghai, China
Medium: Mixed media installation / Tobacco, found objects

A site-specific continuation of the Tobacco Project series, a project investigating the long and entangled relationship betwene human and tobacco. In preparation for the inaugral exhibition at Duke Univeristy, Durham, North Carolina, in 2000, Xu studied many archival materials and discovered the relationship between the Duke family and China – they were the first to import tobacco-rolling technology to Shanghai. This inspired him to bring the project to Shanghai. In 2004 he released Tobacco Project: Shanghai, curated by Wu Hung.

It featured the Shanghai versions of Tobacco Book, which were first shown in Durham, and also new artworks specific to the materials and venue, broadening the dimensions of his Tobacco Project in terms of history, geography and reality. Through tobacco, the project raised profound questions about history and reality, global capital, cultural immersion, and labor market.

Selected work description:

Honor and Splendor, 2004

Xu Bing used 660,000 cigarettes to compose a giant "tiger-skin carpet." With a soft and luxurious appearance, the "carpet" is a massive display of desire, seduction, and danger – ideas that have been long associated with tobacco but also predominant in the human history. The title not only hints on the brand of cigarettes being used, "Wealth" brand, which is ironically one of the cheapest cigarettes in China, but also alludes to what the "carpet" represnts: desire for wealth and status. 

Traveling Down the River, 2000-2004

A long uncut cigarette burned on a reproduction of a famous Chinese handscroll painting, Along the River during the Qingming Festival by Zhang Zeduan (1085-1145). Zhang's painting depicts the scenary of the peak of Chinese people's commercial life in Song dynasty. The long river embodies a sense of history. The burning cigarettes marks the passage of time, leaving a kind of "emptiness" that is the ultimate destiny of tobacco.

Prophecy, 2004

Out of the entire Tobacco Project series, Prophecy least resembles an artwork. It comprises six texts related to tobacco. The first is a document concerning the investments and commercial activities of the British-American Tobacco Company in China. The second is a ledger of the British-American Tobacco Company’s cigarette sales in China, revealing exhorbitant sales figures for the month of October 1919 in Shanghai. The third records the profits of the British-American Tobacco Company in China between October 1918 and June 1919. The fourth document describes how the British-American Tobacco Company transferred a portion of their Chinese profits to America to fund Trinity College (which later became Duke University). The fifth is from July 1998, the budget and check stub from when Duke University invited and sponsored Xu Bing to make “Tobacco Project: Durham.” The sixth and final one is from August 2004, the receipt for the purchase of a portion of “Tobacco Project: Durham” by an American non-profit. A hundred years of prophecy, this work serves to outline the entirety of the Tobacco Project.

Location: The Duke Homestead & Tobacco Museum, The Perkins Library Gallery, Duke University, and Pack House at Duke Homestead, Durham, North Carolina, USA
Medium: Mixed media installation/ tobacco and tobacco related objects

In 1999, Xu Bing accepted an invitation to lecture at Duke University in Durham, North Caroline, and serve as artist-in-residence. The minute he arrived in Durham, he could smell tobacco in the air. He soon learned that the Duke family had got its start farming tobacco, so Durham has long had a reputation as a "tobacco town." On the other hand, because of Duke Medical Center, renowned for its cancer research, it is also a mecca of medical treatment. Xu Bing was intrigued by the ironical paradox that this tobacco capital continued to promote tobacco products but at the same time established an advanced medical center for cancer treatment. Perhaps not coincidentally, Xu's own father died of lung cancer after smoking for many years. 

Through trips to farms, factories, and historical sites, coupled with archival research and reading, Xu came to understand the deep intertwined bond between the people, the industry, the Duke family, the university, and the city. Based on his research and personal experience, he created a variety of objects related to tobacco that compose Tobacco Project: Durham.