Xu Bing

Author: Andrea Glaessner

How does a world-renowned contemporary Chinese artist find himself jet-setting across the world to deliver a lecture in the hills of rural Vermont? Chinese would say ?? (yuan fen, fate). Americans would argue globalization. But for Xu Bing the answer was quite simple, as he demurely replied, "Colin invited me." In fact, it was a combination of all three - Robert P. Youngman Curator of Asian Art Colin Mackenzie, a sprinkle of globalization and a touch of fate - that brought the award-winning MacArthur fellow to Middlebury last Thursday.

In a lecture entitled, "Image and Meaning: the Art of Xu Bing," Xu discussed his prolific body of work that exploits the gamut of traditional and nontraditional media. From his signature Square Word Calligraphy ink paintings to "performance art" featuring tattooed pigs copulating over a floor strewn with books, Xu's work dabbles in the absurd, forcing viewers to toss out tired concepts and reinvent a new framework for looking at art.

The lecture also afforded the Museum of Art community an opportunity to learn more about Xu's "new English calligraphy" paintings currently on view in the Robert Reiff Gallery of Asian Art as well as the two artist proof monkeys from the "Monkeys Grasp for the Moon" installation originally commissioned for a space in the Sackler gallery in Washington D.C.

Xu's work arrived in Middlebury largely by happenstance. In conferring with the anonymous collector responsible for the current exhibition of Chinese painting and bronzes on loan, Mackenzie discovered that the collector also owned the two monkey sculptures that were a prototype for the original work commissioned by the Sackler. The original installation, comprised of 21 laminated wood pieces, is a chain of monkeys formed out of word shapes, each around 2 feet long. Each link in the chain is the word for "monkey" in a different language, ranging from Arabic to German, and the words resemble monkeys themselves, stretched at beginning and end to form long tails and arms with which they link together. The collector graciously offered to loan his two artist proof monkeys, at which point, said Mackenzie, "I thought, well why don't we try and borrow a couple of other works from him and invite him here for a talk. So that's how it came about."

Dressed unassumingly in gray and white and donning a pair of iconic John Lennon spectacles, Xu arrived for lunch at the Center for the Arts looking surprisingly fresh-faced after a 14-hour flight from Beijing just one day prior. C'est la vie for the contemporary artist of the modern era. With work featured in public and permanent collections that span the globe from MOMA to The British Museum to the Fukuoka Asian Art Museum in Japan, Xu is a regular fixture in the international contemporary art scene.

"I regard him as one of the most interesting contemporary Chinese artists and I think he's really a major figure in contemporary international art," said Mackenzie, "One shouldn't simply typecast him as a Chinese artist. He's really very important in the history of late 20th century art."

With a dominant position in the contemporary art arena and an appointment as Vice President of the Central Academy of Fine Arts (CAFA) in Beijing, Xu straddles the increasingly blurred boundary between East and West, occupying a space between the contemporary art hotbeds of New York and Shanghai.

Traveling between the two realms produced ideas that translate directly into Xu's recent work. Intrigued by the use of universal symbols in airplane safety brochures, Xu determined to create a language based on everyday symbols with a capacity for universal recognition. An installation piece still in progress, "??" (di shu)or "Book from the Ground" approaches the conundrum of communication and perception in the context of globalism through the exploration of language and cultural symbols. First exhibited at MOMA in 2007, the installation consists of two computers facing each other, separated by a wall of frosted glass imprinted with a dialogue written in Xu's language of icons.

"??" (tian shu) or "Book from the Sky," is the artist's most iconic masterpiece - a work that put Xu on the map and oriented the direction of his work to the present day. In an interview conducted in Chinese and translated by the writer, Xu referenced the piece heavily in his discussion of central themes and concepts in his art.

"In my work, the most important thing I am trying to achieve is to break down concepts of language, culture, and knowledge. I seek to occupy the space between the boundaries of these concepts and synthesize or mix the boundaries. Language is the most fundamental concept or element of conception, and the work I do between the concepts is the most prolific," said Xu.

Also an installation piece, "Book from the Sky," is in many ways the counterpart to the more recent "Book from the Ground," yet the two works diverge in their respective impact on the viewer. The recent "Book from the Ground" is expressly interactive and exudes a sense of playfulness in its critique on new forms of communication in the 21st century. In contrast, "Book from the Sky," is a sobering rendition of 4,000 mock Chinese characters painstakingly carved into woodblocks and reprinted on billowing paper that hangs from the ceiling.

The work presents dramatically different interpretations depending on the viewer's cultural background and knowledge, yet the theme of universal understanding is still extant. Because the characters are essentially void of meaning or attribution, viewers of every education level and across cultures approach the work equally dumbfounded, finding themselves uniformly incapable of rendering meaning behind the symbols.

"Chinese people understand the idea of playing with characters and this really stirs them up," said Xu, "People who don't understand Chinese still understand the work, but it's a different aspect. For example, they'll look at the work and think the characters are real. And the installation is really beautiful; it puts Chinese culture in a very important position, a respectful and important position, as if the viewer is standing in a temple. But the whole work is absurd. It appears as if it is something the viewer should take seriously, since it was painstakingly constructed, and this makes the absurdity more prominent. The more seriously I work on the installation, the more absurd the work becomes, making the art more powerful."

Mackenzie, who helped install "Book from the Sky" for its debut in a group exhibition of contemporary Chinese artists at the Asia Society in 1998, discussed the powerful experience of viewing the work in-person.

"There's a deliberate ambiguity about "Book from the Sky" that reflects his sense of confusion. It's a rather distressing feeling, whereas [in] the other [works], there's a delight there, not quite the same feeling of stress…Once [the installation] is hung within a room and it fills the room, it's not just that you're looking at strange, irritating graphs that you can't read, but when you go into that room you're surrounded by it, you're enveloped by it, and then you feel really disquieted by it," said Mackenzie.

Following the debut of "Book from the Sky," Xu transitioned to what Mackenzie refers to as the "Chinglish" projects. Four typecasts of these works are currently on view at the Museum. Reinventing the depiction of English words as Chinese characters, the works are legible to English-speaking viewers, though at first glance such viewers are typically oblivious to their ability to comprehend the characters.

Xu described his own Square Word Calligraphy as "a computer virus" or "an unusable word bank." Describing people as "lazy thinkers," Xu articulated how viewers rely on pre-existing concepts to think about art. "My work always offers the view that cultural concepts are limiting and pose obstacles to thinking, just like the ob
stacles presented in my new English calligraphy," said Xu, "The new English calligraphy presents English knowledge and concepts and Chinese knowledge and concepts. Just like a textbook, it offers knowledge about characteristics of the English and Chinese languages. But within our own previous spheres of knowledge this type of calligraphy does not exist, neither does an explanation of this calligraphy. In confronting these types of characters in my work, neither one of the concepts is functional," said Xu.

Most viewers, particularly after repeated interaction with the Square Word Calligraphy paintings, wonder about the significance of the content Xu chose to translate into his new English. For example, "Song of Myself: Square Wood Calligraphy" is a direct translation of a Walt Whitman poem while another, "Talks at the Yenan Forum on Literature and Art Square Word Calligraphy, 2001" is of a poem written by Mao Zedong. The title refers to the 1942 talks given by Mao concerning the impact of literature and art in class struggles. When asked about the meaning during the interview, Xu casually replied, "Of course it has meaning, these are just things I like, things from Chinese and western culture that I particularly like."

During the question and answer session following the lecture, a member of the audience asked about the significance of the Mao Zedong poem piece in particular. Xu explained how the work reflects the conflicting legacy of Mao Zedong on aspects of Chinese culture, particularly language. According to Xu, "Mao Zedong started to change the way people think through changing our language. When I was first starting to study and go to school, the transformation of the language was in the middle of occurring." The national campaign to transform Chinese characters from traditional to simplified had a lasting impact on Xu Bing. Additionally, Xu discussed how a recurring childhood experience of being locked in a room full of books before Xu could read was "confusing," attributing to the often disquieting nature of his language-centric works.

At the same time, Xu's art, particularly his later works, confer a sense of playfulness on the viewer. According to Xu, this playfulness is a tool to engage the viewer, drawing them deeper into the work. "My hope is that my works appear friendly and welcoming, and are easy to get into," said Xu, "Then the important part is that once the viewer is inside, they discover the work's many different aspects, especially the deeper meaning. I hope my works cause people's thinking patterns to change and has an influence on those thought processes in some way."

Hence, Xu's work avoids the use of cultural symbols that carry too much meaning. "Cultural symbols that carry too much importance are not good to use. The inherent meaning of these types of symbols is too strong. For example, death, tomb, feminism, are so strong, including sex, these types of subjects are so strong that it's like being hit by a bullet," said Xu.

While Xu's work strives for universal understanding, there is a thread of distinct "Chinese-ness" woven into each individual piece, the most obvious example being the influence of ?? (shu fa, Chinese calligraphy). Xu's deep interest in Chinese characters began while he was living in the countryside during the Cultural Revolution (1980-1987). Xu was "sent down" along with millions of other intellectuals and urban youth to perform manual labor in remote villages under Mao's famously orchestrated "thought reform" campaign.

Xu explained the impact of this experience on his work.

"I lived in a small mountain village outside Beijing. Because this village was so remote, these incredibly ancient cultural folk traditions had been preserved. For example, after someone died, old people would take out these strange characters and copy them on a white cloth that they then hung in the wind. These strange characters were meant to allow the living and dead to communicate. At that time, these experiences and folk customs had a lot of influence on me. Then later, I rediscovered some of these traditions in books I was studying. But I directly came in contact with these customs in while living in the countryside," said Xu.

Beijing today is a world away from the city it was during the Mao era. Xu himself described the city as "incredibly fascinating," despite his rather tumultuous experiences in the Northern capital under Mao's oppressive thought reform campaign. Today, Xu serves as Vice President of CAFA - perhaps the most prestigious art institution in China. Though the administrative nature of his new position keeps him busy, Xu is thrilled with the work going on. "[Working at CAFA] gives me a lot of new inspiration and ideas." As Xu continues to expand his prolific body of work, constantly adding new projects to the mix, his fans wait in eager anticipation of the conceptual artist's next tour de force.

(The interview was conducted in Chinese by Andrea Glaessner before being translated into English.)