Material: Ink on Xuan paper

Dimensions variable 

Location: American Academy in Rome

The Wall and the Road is an installation comprising of The Wall (1990-1991) and The Road (2024). The Road was commissioned by the American Academy in Rome during Xu Bing's residency there. The work is a 24-meter long drawing of a section of the Appian Way (Via Appia), produced on site in partnership with the Parco Archeologico dell'Appia Antica in collaboration with students from the Accademia di Belle Arti di Roma, Nuova Accademia delle Belle Arti, Istituto Europeo del Designas, The Hang Seng University of Hong Kong, and the City University of Hong Kong. The work was realized with the technique of rubbing, for which the process is as followed: apply natural adhesive to the object to be reproduced, cover it with a large sheet of Xuan paper, then "poach" the surface with ink-soaked cotton wads, and lastly, peel away the rubbing from the surface of the object.  The details of the Appian Way stone blocks preserved in the work bear witness to the centuries-old history of this ancient path. Xu Bing has used this technique before in the other work exhibited, The Wall (1990-91), rubbing drawing of a tower of the Chinese Wall. It is the first time that this work is exhibited in Italy. For Xu Bing, the technique of rubbing holds rich historical and philosophical significance: it not only contains traces of the past but also symbolizes revelatory communication that transcends the limits of time and space.

2021-2022

Media: Mixed media

Dimensions: 145 x 100 x 2.4 x 8 cm

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

Since 2004, Xu Bing has sought to create a book comprehensible to all human beings using solely public signs. Although it has been more than a decade since the start of this project, it is ever evolving. With the growing globalization of “graphic expression” brought by digital computation, new forms of expressions such as emojis and memes have emerged, particularly popular among young generations. These contemporary signs, seemingly disconnected from ancient traditions, now find their place in the main exhibition hall of the Palace Museum. While the audience may initially struggle to adjust to the translation of  “兰亭集序” in emojis and memes, the resulting sense of alienation produced is essential to this work’s intention—to supply traditional modes of thinking with new “elements”. Through this approach, one may gain a better understanding of both traditional and contemporary cultures.

In contemporary language, “Wujing Cuishi” (“a room assembling five classics”) would mean “library”. Ancient Chinese culture adeptly employed images to convey complex ideas, demonstrating that looking at images is akin to reading texts. “Shu Hua Tong Yuan” (“writing and drawing bear the same root”) is less of a commentary on style, but rather a reflection of semiotics. The way in which the Chinese character “shan” (“mountain”) is written is comparable to the way in which one would draw a mountain. Despite the evolution of signification techniques, hieroglyphs, and coreference in modern Chinese, the hieroglyphic constituents still form the genetic core of the language. For instance, when one reads the word “门” (“door”), one sees the image of a door. If one were to bolt the door, adding a rod/stroke on it, then one arrives at “闩” (“latch”). Even when one writes the character “囧” (“undesirable distress”), it resembles the creation of an emoji.

Winessing the continuity of communication through pictures and images, especially in the context of the cyberpunk and space age, is truly captivating. It evokes a sense of time travel, residing in this juncture and perceiving life’s expansion across time and space. To describe this as merely entering the age of images is somewhat inaccurate, as humanity has been immersed in this mode of communication for thousands of years. Today, our daily lives are deeply intertwined with the use of cell phones, which serve as our portable libraries and museums. As soon as we turn them on, our first instinct is to read the signs they present to us. 

Xu Bing’s profound sensitivity to signs stems from the genetic ability of reading images ingrained within us. It is deeply rooted in humanity’s tradition, and its fullest potential is realized when it is activated.

Related Link：https://mp.weixin.qq.com/s__biz=MjM5Njg5ODA4OA==&mid=2247485023&idx=1&sn=25c1441184afa62a0ed683cf264418aa&chksm=a6e372189194fb0e2ff59b461516abdbc915276df0ce2bd8ff3159ec30eb24b74721f64a3a6e#rd

2021-2022

Medium: Mixed media installation

Dimensions: 25.5 x 15.7 x 15.7 m

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 the ground. While creating a distorted textual space, it simultaneously immerses the viewers into an interplay between “seeing” and “reading”.

The initial challenge of “seeing” arises when viewers position themselves beneath the work. In addition to the reversed text, the contortions and overlaps render the characters in the exhibition hall difficult to read. Simultaneously, the mirror on the floor embeds the text into a warped wormhole model which interconnects the two inverted spaces. While the reversed characters become legible in the mirror image, the audience is still unable to see the work in its entirety. The combination of the installation and the museum space seems to present a theatrically inviting quality. As visitors ascend to higher floors and alter their viewing perspectives, the distorted characters appear increasingly familiar. From the top floor, the viewers can finally see the front of the characters; however, remain unable to read the body of text as a whole. Where lies this work’s ideal perspective?

Fundamentally, the installation can be perceived as an optical illusion. Since people are accustomed to reading words written on a flat surface, words are stretched in space, the ideal viewing perspective becomes non-existent. When the three-dimensional is converted to the two-dimensional, the laws of perspective give rise to a conflicting relationship. The interplay between the artwork’s form and the viewer’s standpoint pushes the ideal viewing perspective to an unattainable height beyond the confines of the museum. This perspective exists solely on a conceptual level.

The law of perspective exists due to the inherent limitation of human vision, which cannot bend. In this work, this very limitation transforms into a unique “material”. The law of perspective functions as a language that we employ to articulate and understand the world. Like any other language, it serves as an intermediary between our thoughts and the external world. Nonetheless, our thinking is inevitably influenced by various languages, resulting in potential blind spots. These blind spots may also exist beyond linguistic demonstrations.

The Square Word Calligraphy contained in this work is transcribed from an excerpt by philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein. Although it appears to be an analysis of several visual experiments, this passage actually points to a common misunderstanding in human cognition. Wittgenstein argues that people are inclined to summarize concepts with logic, emplying a systematic approach to comprehend the world through clarifying these concepts. In reality, this practice distances us from the genuine aspects of the world, much like the ongoing tensions among civilizations that orignate from disparities and divergent human perspectives. This creates an arena fraught with tensions and gravitational forces. The characters, distorted by space, fall into a chaos of illegibility, with each element pointing to an “ideal perspective” suspended outside the exhibition hall. It is as if all the chaos in the world stems from an unknown purpose—an unseen yet palpable existence.

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

2020 

Materials: Book, silkworm

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

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

Medium: Performance and video editing

2018

Exhibition Location: Ullens Center for Contemporary Art, Beijing, China

2019

Exhibition Location: Somerset House, London, England

Male Feng, MASS MoCA, 2012

2008－2016

The magnificent installation of Xu Bing's Phoenix, a pair of two Chinese phoenixes (feng and huang), consists of thousands of abandoned materials and workers' tools that Xu Bing collected from construction sites in Beijing. While fenghuang is 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  inherent in the process of urbanization. Furthermore, Phoenix recognizes the efforts of ordinary workers and draws attention to urban topics such as environmental crises and labor conditions.

When Phoenix traveled to Shanghai (2010), MASS MoCA (2012), New York (2014), and the 56th Venice Biennale (2015), visitors from all over the world were not only impressed by the large-scale splendor of the two birds, but also deeply moved by the mélange of scars and hopes they carried.

2008

Materials: Carved Stone

Dimensions: Varies

Location: Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden, Germany

The Background Story series is constructed of a combination of plants and stones, arranged in a manner reminiscent of a traditional East Asian painting. As visiors move through the exhibition, they may encounter a passageway that offers a glimpse behind the scenes. Here, they can observe dry twigs and branches of pine trees, as well as decorations made from simple materials like modeling clay and cotton wool, held together with adhesive tape and fishing line. 

This behind-the-scenes view allows visitors to witness something that would normally be kept hidden at an exhibition. Behind the walls of the exhibition space, there is a maintenance area with heating pipes and empty shelving. From the outside, only the surface is visible, but upon closer inspection, one can discover the internal workings closely intertwined with the external image.

2003—ongoing

Xu Bing’s Book from the Ground, which he has been working on since 2003, is an ongoing exploration of communication and language. The project involves compiling symbols and pictograms from the public sphere and using them to create a book exclusively written in visual language. 

The uniqueness of Book from the Ground lies in its accessibility to any reader belonging to contemporary society. Regardless of one’s cultural or linguistic background, the book’s material can be interpreted and understood due to the universal nature of its visual symbols. This eliminates the need for translation and can be published anywhere.

For the Book fom the Ground installation, Xu Bing recreates the working environment of his studio. By bringing select materials from his studio, he symbolically suggests the continuous nature of the project as a never-ending exploration of visual communication. 

Furthermore, Xu Bing Studio also created a character database software that corresponds to the language of the book. Users can enter words either in English or in Chinese, and subsequently, 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 computers 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 complexified. In response to his own Book from the Sky (1988) whose language is completely illegible, Book from the Ground is contrastingly legible to all. It may be considered an expression of Xu Bing’s long-standing vision of a universal language.

2001

Materials: Cut and painted acrylic

Location: Arthur M. Sackler Gallery, Smithsonian Institution, Washington D.C., U.S.A.

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

Produced over the course of four years, this four-volume treatise features thousands of meaningless characters resembling Chinese. Each character was meticulously designed by the artist in a Song-style font that was standardized by artisans in the Ming dynasty. In this immersive installation, the artist hand-carved over four thousand moveable type printing blocks. The painstaking production process and the format of the work, arrayed like ancient Chinese classics, were such that the audience could not believe that these exquisite texts were completely illegible. The work simultaneously entices and denies the viewer’s desire to read the work.

As Xu Bing has noted, the false characters “seem to upset intellectuals,” provoking doubt in established systems of knowledge. Many early viewers would spend considerable time scrutinizing the texts, fixedly searching for genuine characters amidst the illegible ones.

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, within a gallery or museum space. Desks are supplied 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, Elementary Square Word Calligraphy Instruction, is played on a monitor in the exhibition space, capturing the audience’s attention and inviting them to participate in the class. Once seated at the desks, the audience is instructed to seize 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 participants attempt to recognize and read the words,their ingrained thinking patterns are challenged. Accordingly, the artist strongly believes in the significance of disrupting habitual thinking. 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 had a longstanding tradition that emphasizes the interconnectedness of calligraphy and painting, considering them to have shared origins. Xu Bing’s Landscript, a landscape-in-script artwork, transforms visual images of landscapes into linguistic forms. Through this, viewers are prompted to reassess the distinctiveness of Chinese culture hidden within traditional landscape paintings and offers a unique approach to “reading 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

Dimensions: 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 his longstanding vision: to create rubbings of a monumental natural object. It was during this time that he concieved the notio that any textured object could be transferred onto a two-dimensional surface as a print. After much preparation, in May, Xu Bing, friends, students, and local residents set off for the Jinshanling section of the Great Wall. They dedicated slightly 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 reloacting to the United States later that year. The artwork was subsequently exhibited for the first time in the United States, where Xu Bing noted that "Those American printers were shocked by the piece's size." The fact that the work emerged during a period of transition gives it an additional layer of meaning to its significance. 

 

The title Ghost Pounding the Wall is translated from the Chinese aphorism “Gui Da Qiang,” which can be interpreted as “a wall built by ghosts.” This phrase carries the meaning to be stuck in one’s own thinking, refering to a story of a man trapped behind walls built by ghosts. Viewers of Book from the Sky used this epithet to express their inability to comprehend the work. Xu Bing embraced his criticism and appropriated it as the title for his new work—employing a clever play on words where the term “build” can also mean “pound” in Chinese.  

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

The phrase ziqi donglai is derived from the Han Dynasty Daoist hagiography Liexian Zhuan. It describes a purple breeze that proceeded Laozi as he approached Hangu Pass. The phrase ziqi donglai has come into modern Chinese as a set-phrase to describe a good omen. Xu Bing selected four ancient Chinese pictographs related to weather, cloud, rain, air, and water, to create the installation. Tinted purple and made of organic glass, these characters create an illusion of foggy breeze descending from the sky-light window of the Chinese embassy. 

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 in 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 Square Word Calligraphy first appeare 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?''

Xu’s text, evoking the phraseology of an elementary English-as-a-second language textbook, points to the shared experiences of new immigrants to the United States. By presenting a request for directions to viewers who are already physically at the Asia Society, this installation poses a deeper existential question: ''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,'' which echoes the exploration of the same concept in his Square World Calligraphy.

2001

Medium: mixed media installation/ silkworm

Location: Eslite Gallery, Taipei, Taiwan

2000

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 utilize Chinese characters in their language systems, namely Japan, Korea, and China. Xu's work focuses on the conept 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, fiercely battles with a demon but finds himself on the losing end. Employing the mystical technique of ''shen wai shen'' (which can roughly be translated as self-cloning in modern terms), Sun Wukong takes a strand of his own hair and places it in his mouth, thereby releasing thousands of miniature replicas of himself. These tiny clones then join forces to overcome and ultimately defeat the demon. 

Using Chinese, Japanese, and Korean, respectively, to transcribe passages from the tale, the artist displays each version on separate panels mounted on the wall, with each character inscribed on its own small, square notebook. Audience members are invited to freely tear off sheets of characters, unexpectedly revealing underneath a word written in a different language. This intentional random mixing of languages in this artwork creates a narrative that resermbles a collage of different texts. This juxtaposition of languages generates a sense of cacophony, reflecting the complexity of linguistic diversity in a multicultural world. However, amidst this apparent chaos, there are moments when the random mixing of words restores a sense of normalcy and coherence, highlighting the interconnectedness of languages. 

On the reverse side of each sheet of paper, Xu Bing's website address, http://www.xubing.com, is inscribed. One implication of the work is the notion that with the facilitation of internet technology, one can attain something of the magical ability for self-generation, bearing semblance to that of the supernatural monkey’s own methods of endless reproduction in the story. 

1992

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

In 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 may initially appear to be traditional, each one is actually a contemporary text designed to be incomprehensible to the reader. The 600 volumes are piled onto a reading table with dimensions of 56 feet by 12 feet, serving as fractured emblems of two cultured systems of knowledge. Above the table, a large sign reading “QUIET” invites the audience to sit and peruse the books. The contrast between the ordered public reading space, emphasized by the “QUIET” warning, and the chaos of the information-less books scattered on the table points to significant cultural implications. 

1993

Medium: Mixed media installation / Braille books and book covers

This work, which combines the words “braille” and “illiterate” in its title, features a reading room equipped with a table stacked with books. The covers of these books have been altered by the artist to feature English titles superimposed over the original braille titles. However, in actuality, the English titles are completely different from the braille titles, and bear no relation to the actual content of the books. Upon opening the books, a sighted viewer might expect to find an English text inside, but instead discovers pages printed in braille. The content of the braille pages would be assumed to correspond to the English title on the cover. Conversely, a blind viewer who is literate in braille, unaware of the misleading English title, would not know that sighted readers had a completely wrong impression of the book's content. As such, Brailliterate acts as an experiment to explore how the same object can be interpreted by different viewers in completely different ways. Only those who possess both full visual capacity and knowledge in braille would be able to fully grasp the deception at play. This provcative work raises important questions about cultural bias, misinterpretation, and the potential for concealment within our understanding and communication. 

1992－1993

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

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

This installation consists of 300 specially printed and bound volumes titled Post Testament. Within these books is an unusual hybrid text, combining the King James’ version of the New Testament with a trashy, contemporary novel by alternating each word of the two texts. This unique arrangement requires the reader to skip every word in order to read either complete text. Regardless of which narrative the reader follows, the visual presence of the other narrative cannot be avoided, leaving a lasting imprint in the reader’s mind. The hybrid text thus presents a new and unconventional reading pattern. With Post Testament, Xu Bing attempts to experiment with the relation between avant-garde literature and visual art.

1991

Materials: Unglazed terracotta installation/woodblock

The theme of Xu Bing’s artwork A, B, C… is centered around the awkwardness and limitations inherent to cross-cultural communication. It consists of thirty-eight ceramic cubes, each representing a sort of transliteration from the twenty-six letters of the Roman alphabet to Chinese characters. The chosen characters are selected based on their pronunciation, creating sounds equivalent to the corresponding Roman letters that they represent. 

The Chinese characters are carved on the top face of each ceramic block in the form of a printer's stamp, while the Roman letter is printed on the side. 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 require two or three Chinese characters to transliterate. For example, “W” is rendered “da,” “bu,” “liu,” which mean big, cloth, and six, respectively. This activity begins with a logical pattern, but ultimately deviates from its intended meaning. Due to the loss of the original context and semantic connections, the resulting transliteral language increasingly appears meaningless and absurd.

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 earliest 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 his 1997 version, two huge nets were constructed of aluminum wire, with the links 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 colossal trap. The second net 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 Net's "wire words" was composed of personal observations provided by individuals who aided the artist in the net's construction. Xu Bing’s choice to include sheep in the installation stems from his appreciation of the way they observe their surroundings. 

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 piece, Xu Bing trained a parrot to communicate certain sentiments to the gallery audiences. Throughout the exhibition, the parrot remains in its cage and recites pre-learned phrases, some of which include: 

“You people are so boring!”

“Modern art is crap!”

“Why are you holding me prisoner, you bastards!”

2011

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

As an extension of the ongoing Tobacco Project series, which explores the long and entangled relationship between humans and tobacco, Xu Bing embarked on a site-specific endeavor.

 

After executing the project in Durham (2000) and Shanghai (2004), Xu Bing chose Richmond, Virginia as the next significant city associated with tobacco. Richmond is home to Philip Morris, the parent company of the famous Marlboro cigarette brand. During his residency, Xu Bing studied tobacco's intimate relationship with the American continent, as well as its historical ties to early immigrants. 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 various works created during the initial phases of the Tobacco Project, Xu Bing expanded his art project on tobacco to include print works. These works raise 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.

2000

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 deliver a lecture at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina, and serve as artist-in-residence. Upon his arrival in Durham, he could immediately smell the tobacco in the air. He soon learned that the Duke family had their origins in farming tobacco, which had established Durham as a renowned "tobacco town." Interestingly, Durham was also home to Duke Medical Center, a prominent institution recognized for its cancer research, making the town a hub for medical treatment. Xu Bing was intrigued by the ironic coexistence of these contrasting identities. Perhaps not coincidentally, Xu's own father tragically died of lung cancer as a result of his years-long smoking habit. This personal connection added a poignant layer to Xu's exploration of tobacco and its profound impact on individuals and communities.

Through expeditions to farms, factories, and historical sites, coupled with archival research and literature study, Xu came to understand the intricate relationships between the people, the industry, the Duke family, the university, and the city of Durham. Based on his research and personal experience, he created a variety of objects related to tobacco that compose Tobacco Project I: Durham.

2001, 2008

Materials: Lacquer on baltic birch wood (2001)

                  Lacquer on fiber (2008)

Location: Arthur M. Sackler Gallery, Smithsonian Institution, Washington D.C., USA (2001)

                U.S. Embassy, Beijing, China (2008)

The idea for this installation originated from a Chinese idiom, "monkeys grasp for the moon," which alludes to an ancient folktale. The tale narrates the story of a group of monkeys who, perched on a branch of a tree, catch sight of the reflection of the moon in a pool of water below. In an attempt to touch what they perceive to be the real moon, the monkeys decide to link their arms and tails together. When at last they “touch” the moon, it vanishes as ripples disrupt its reflection in the water. This fanciful yet thought-provoking tale reminds us that what we strive to achieve may sometimes prove to be elusive illusions.

Xu Bing's own work, Monkeys Grasp for the Moon, presents a chain of monkeys formed wholly out of word shapes. Each link in the chain is the word for "monkey" in a different international language, including Hindi, Japanese, French, Spanish, Hebrew and English. These words are stylized to resemble monkeys themselves. Monkeys Grasp for the Moon extends through the heart of the Arthur M. Sackler Gallery's main staircase, suspended 90 feet from the skylight at the top of this atrium to a reflecting pool on the lowest floor of the gallery.