Get to know Xu Bing ahead of one of 2018's biggest exhibitions

All images courtesy of Xu Bing Studio

The revered Beijing artist displays some of his most thought-provoking work

Xu Bing is much more than an artist: he is an inventor, an academic, a MacArthur Foundation genius, and a quiet humanitarian philanthropist. His practice is rigorous, his thinking post-contemporary and his aesthetic diverse.

Chongqing-born but Beijing-raised, the Central Academy of Fine Arts (CAFA) graduate first gained widespread recognition for what would become his magnum opus, Book from the Sky (1987-91) – a mammoth four-volume tome of over 4,000 arduously hand-carved, completely meaningless ersatz Chinese characters, displayed as a monumental installation on every surface and suspended from the ceiling (pictured above).

The artist at work.

This work was the springboard for Xu Bing's international career, and in the early '90s, like many young Chinese artists at the time, he moved to New York. Finding himself culturally displaced and struggling to learn the language, his mediations on the printed form, social communication, text and symbols took on new inter-cultural meanings. He soon created Square Word Calligraphy (1994-96), in which he invented a system of writing English words with the shape and strokes of Chinese characters. By extension, Book from the Ground (2003) is an ongoing multimedia project written entirely in emoji-like symbols.

However, Xu Bing's work has not been without criticism. Just last year, a performance piece entitled A Case Study of Transference (1994) – in which he covered a pig in gibberish words from the Roman alphabet and another in his invented Chinese characters then mated them together over piles of books – was removed from New York’s Guggenheim Museum.

Square word calligraphy classroom.

Elsewhere, his explorations of language and literacy have been less inflammatory: in Forest Project (2005-09), for example, he worked with schoolchildren in Kenya to make calligraphic drawings of trees in Swahili and English, and then provided an international platform to sell their works, raising money to replant the local forests.

In 2008, Xu finally returned to Beijing and to CAFA, where he served as the institution's vice-president, shaping the artists and art of China's future. 'A new mode of civilisation is currently taking shape in China' he said upon his return, and that it was time to use 'the nutrition of China's new culture in my future creation'.

His recent work, Dragonfly Eyes, also his debut feature-length film, is all about this new society. With no director, cameramen or actors, the artist instead sourced thousands of hours of surveillance footage through China's online security viewing platforms (including the recently closed Shuidi Live Broadcast), and edited it down into drama. It's a story of love, obsession, celebrity culture and online isolation, and scarily we may have all played a part.

A still from Dragonfly Eyes.

A historic retrospective: what to expect?

This exhibition will be the largest solo exhibition of Xu Bing held in Mainland China, displaying the artist’s oeuvre from the 1980s onwards. Highlights will include some of his early prints from the 1980s (which stylistically build upon the printmaking tradition of Lu Xun), the aforementioned Book from the Sky, and the interactive Square Word Calligraphy Classroom, where viewers will be able to learn to write Xu Bing's unique English character system. Also exhibited are lesser known and rarely shown works from his career such as Slow-Moving Computer Platform (2003), a prescient art invention designed to prevent a stagnant desk position in this screen-focused world.

When we spoke with co-curator Feng Boyi, he was keen to stress that this exhibition is not just about the works of art, or a timeline of Xu Bing's work, but about the artist's unique methodology, creative process and conceptual framework. How do mating pigs and illegible characters relate? The answer is clearly not in form, but in thought. Ultimately, however diverse, Xu Bing's body of work comes together to speak of a broader theme: the relationship between human civilisation and human beings.

A visionary mind

The artist claims to have lived through several lifetimes, and that 'art doesn't come from life, it comes from living'. Rigorously perceptive, Xu Bing's thinking is one step ahead, prescient and alert as he anticipates society's next move. A rarely cited and somewhat avant-garde example of this is a work produced alongside the former director of the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Chazen Museum of Art, Russell Panczenko. Here, he created an installation piece based on the idea of cellphone-operated sex toys to overcome intimacy complicated by distance, well before such remote- and app-controlled vibrators were a thing – this was 2003.

Dragonfly Eyes also does exactly this. Conceptualised and embarked upon years before the current climate of data breaches, this invasion of privacy is so current that it strikes to our very core. Xu Bing knew way before us that we live in a post-surveillance age: online, anyone can be watching. It is with this prescience that he remains one of the most thought-provoking contemporary artists of a generation.

Xu Bing: Thought and Method is at UCCA from July 21 to October 18. Tickets are 100RMB; 60RMB (presale).

For the best art exhibitions in Beijing this July, hit 'Read more'. 

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