The Forest Project is an experiment of creating a self-sustaining system that will move funds from wealthy areas to impoverished areas for planting trees. Its feasibility is based on the following principles: firstly, utilize free online services such as auction and sales hosting, money transfers, and even online teaching to achieve the lowest possible costs; secondly, benefit everyone involved in the project; thirdly, utilize regional economic discrepancies ($2.50 is a subway ride in New York, but it can plant ten trees in Kenya). 

1993

Medium: media/found oil paintings, falsified magazine article

The title of this work refers to the Chinese name of a Manhattan street located on the Lower East Side. On this street, the artist salvaged a group of non-representational oil paintings from the garbage, providing the catalyst for this conceptual piece.

''Wu'' in Chinese has various meanings, including both ''misunderstanding'' and ''enlightenment'' in the Chan (Zen) sense. This dichotomy between understanding and misunderstanding is integral to ''Wu Street.'' Xu paired the salvaged paintings with a ''profoundly deep'' article by a critic interpreting the abstract paintings of the renowned artist Jonathan Lasker. Xu's intention was to demonstrate his feeling that the critic's opaque interpretation of Lasker's works could just as well be applied to the salvaged works. As a next step, Xu altered the critical text by substituting the real names and art works with false names and illustrations of the found paintings. He then hired a professional translator to translate the altered text into Chinese, making it even more incomprehensible, and subsequently published the falsified, translated article in a prestigious art magazine in China under the pseudonym of Jason Jones. On the surface, Wu Street appears to be no more than an elaborate practical joke; yet it poses serious questions concerning the contemporary art system, the often arbitrary nature of critical language and the basis for assessing the value of 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.” 

2002

Material: Apples

This work was created as part of an exhibition held in Beijing on the day before China's National Day celebrations in October 2002. The event was partially sponsored by Qixia municipality in Shandong province, an area famous for apple cultivation, thus inspiring Xu Bing to make apples the central element of the piece. 

The artist used the majority of his materials budget to purchase three tons of apples to be distributed to the working people of Beijing as National Day gifts. Three large trucks, festooned with banners reading ''Golden Apples Send Warm Greetings'' and ''Best Wishes to the Workers of the Capital on National Day,'' traveled through several working-class areas of Beijing and distributed free apples to the people. A television broadcast van followed the action, broadcasting it live onto ten large television sets installed at various points in the exhibition venue. Interspersed throughout this live broadcast were segments taken from old propaganda films of Chairman Mao distributing mangos as gifts to workers in Beijing.

In this work the artist appropriates the concept of ''socialist consideration'' or ''compassion''(shehui juyi wenqing) embedded in the collective memory of a whole generation of Chinese for the purposes of artistic expression. Taking as his basis both the ongoing and the historical changes in virtually every class of Chinese society, Xu seeks to demonstrate that the transformation of Chinese society is not merely one of surface, but of deepest substance.