Xu Bing

photo: Jeff Morgan/Artes Mundi

Booklyn is proud to present the artwork of Xu Bing. Books, prints, installations, workshops and lectures by Xu Bing are all available via Booklyn.

Xu Bing was just awarded the first Artes Mundi prize, a new $75,000 art award created here to stimulate interest in contemporary art in Wales.

Biography
Xu Bing was born in Chongqing, China in 1955 and grew up in Beijing. In 1975, he was relocated to the countryside for two years during the Cultural Revolution. In 1977, he enrolled in the Central Academy of Fine Art in Beijing, where he studied printmaking. He received an MFA from the Central Academy in 1987. In 1990, he moved to the United States and he still lives there today, making his home in Brooklyn, New York.

In July of 1999, Xu Bing was awarded the MacArthur Award for Genius by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation in recognition of his originality, creativity, self-direction, and capacity to contribute importantly to society, particularly in printmaking and calligraphy.

Selected upcoming exhibitions in 2003:
Solo exhibition at Chinese Art Centre, Manchester, England
Drawing the Line, Pacific Asia Museum, Pasadena, CA
Happiness, Mori Art Center, Tokyo

Selected solo exhibitions:
2001 Arthur Sackler Gallery, Smithsonian Institution, Washington DC
2001 Eslite Gallery, Taipei
2000 National Gallery of Prague
1998 New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York
1997 Joan Miro Foundation, Mallorca
1997 Institute of Contemporary Art, London
1988 National Gallery of Beijing

Selected Group exhibitions:
2002 Guangzhou Triennial, China
2002 Sydney Biennial, Australia
2002 Kwangju Art Museum, Korea
2001 Victoria and Albert Museum, London
1999 Museum of Modern Art, New York
1999 P.S. 1, New York
1999 Museum Ludwig, Koln
1999 San Francisco Museum of Modern Art
1998 ICC, International Communications Center, Tokyo
1994 Reina Sofia National Art Center, Madrid
1993 45th Venice Biennial, Italy

Catalog of Books, Installation, and Workshops

A Book from the Sky
1987-1991, edition of 100 sets of 4 volumes, 23 sets available

Each set includes: 1 walnut-wood box (49 x 33 x 10cm), containing 4 books (46 x 30 x 8.5cm total) with a total of over 500 pages of hand-carved woodblocks of unrecognizable words which are hand-printed with water-based ink on special rice-paper used for Buddhist books and hand-bound with thread using traditional Chinese binding technique. Within each set, the 1st and 2nd volume are printed in regular text format, the 3rd volume is printed in Buddhist book format, and the 4th volume is printed in dictionary format.

A Book from the Sky took Xu Bing over four years to complete. The installation is comprised of hundreds of printed volumes, ceiling and wall scrolls containing a vocabulary of four thousand 'false' Chinese characters invented by the artist and then painstakingly hand-cut onto wooden printing blocks. Each set of books is a complete wood cut edition, printed with the same four thousand word vocabulary as used in the installation volumes.

Within the exhibition space, numerous sets of open, hand-printed books propped on specially designed wooden mounts are installed in rows on the ground. Ceiling scrolls billow down over the books, and hanging scrolls are mounted on the surrounding walls. The materials and techniques used in the production of these elegant objects all followed the prescriptions of classical Chinese printing, scroll design and bookbinding. Yet the texts they contain are all written in 'false characters' that resemble Chinese characters but are in fact virtually unintelligible. As a result, within this fabricated cultural space, every reader is made illiterate. Even the artist himself is unable to read the works he has printed. The artist's intention is to produce a kind of cultural shock that will heighten the viewer's awareness of received notions of language and culture. Since its debut exhibition in Beijing in 1988, Book from the Sky has been exhibited at venues all over the world. The work has generated a great deal of critical attention and discussion, and has been published in a number of major art historical studies.

Three different versions of the installation of Book From the Sky are in the collections of:
Queensland Art Gallery
Hong Kong Museum
Ludwig Museum
Individual sets of Book From the Sky are in the collections of:
Princeton University
Harvard University
Fukuoka Asian Art Museum
The British Museum
and many private collectors in the US, Europe, Japan, and China

An Introduction to Square Word (New English) Calligraphy Books
The deluxe, limited-edition Introduction to Square Word Calligraphy rubbing book is hand printed from hand carved woodblocks on rice paper and butterfly bound with wood covers and enclosed in a wood case, all created entirely in traditional Chinese style.

It is accompanied by one copy of the Red-Line Tracing Book, machine printed from hand in red ink on yellow rice paper and bound in a booklet format. Printed in 2001, edition of 99, signed.

The simple version of the Introduction to Square Word Calligraphy Book is machine printed on regular white paper and bound in the same booklet format of the Red-Line Tracing Book. It is also accompanied by one copy of the Red-Line Tracing Book. Printed in 1994-1996, 350 editions, signed.

These sets of books provide instruction and practice space for the basic principles of New English Calligraphy, a writing system invented and designed by the artist.

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 artists' belief that people must have their routine thinking attacked in this way.

New English Calligraphy workshops by the artist prompt this attack (with the assistance of instructional videos and copybooks). 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.

Tobacco Project: Red Book
Printed in 1999, 19 single box quotes, signed and numbered, in editions of 5, and 7 double box quotes (long quotes are printed on 2 separate boxes of cigarettes that are sold together), in editions of 5.

Commissioned by Duke University in Durham, North Carolina, this project focuses on the University's historical connection to Durham's `tobacco culture' and its economic ties to the cultivation and sale of tobacco products. It also addresses the related historical issue of the impact on China of the large-scale exportation of tobacco products to that country from the U.S. beginning in the late 19th century. Xu created a series of multi-media installations incorporating the materials, processes and consequences of tobacco manufacture (Xu Bing's father died of lung cancer in a Beijing hospital). The works were exhibited in diverse venues throughout the city, including the University's Perkins Library, the Durham Tobacco Museum, and an abandoned tobacco manufacturing plant. In exploring the complex connections between people and tobacco, the project's ultimate exploration is of fundamental issues of human culture.

Post Testament
A printed and bound book with religious and secular texts, printed in 1994, in an edition of 250.

The book looks like a weighty tome of literary significance. The content of the book, however, presents quite a different story: a strange, hybrid text which the artist created by combining the King James Version of the New Testament with that of a trashy contemporary novel, through alternating each word of the 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. At the same time and on another level of cognition, it creates a kind of third narrative that limns the border between avant-garde literature and visual art. Post Testament also allows readers to engage with highly loaded texts that are removed from their usual connotations.

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