2015-

Medium: Clothing label and programming writing

Dimension：Each piece 35.7 x 26.3 cm x 12

                     Outside packing 41 × 28.5 × 3.5 cm

Exhibition：Museum of Art Pudong, Shanghai, 2021-2022. TOKYO Gallery + BTAP, Beijing, 2021. 

Since 2015, Xu Bing has collected tens of thousands of clothing brand labels from small private enterprises. These labels reflect the history of their entrepreneurship, development, bottlenecks, conversions, and acquisitions when put together. Meanwhile, we can also consider the brand name as inherited with people’s expectations and aspirations for their future. We develop a “poem writing software” particularly for this project. The computer program searches for appropriate words and sentences among fashion label tags to create a “Seven-Character Poem，” then later compiled into the collection. It is also an advancement in the creation of an “artist book.”

2000

Medium: Roll of uncut cigarette paper, printed with book of poetry, With the Poets in Smokeland (1890), and wooden crank mechanism

Size: 24 1/8 x 29 7/8 x 12 in.

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

                  Xu Bing Tobacco Project: Shanghai, Shanghai Gallery of Art, Shanghai, China, 2004

                  Tobacco project 3, Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Richmond, Virginia, USA, 2011

2000

Medium: Custom-cut "American Spirit" brand cigarattes, Chinese texts from Daodejing and Chairman Mao's words handwritten in ink, encased in hinged wooden box

Size: Case (closed): 3 1/2 x 3 7/8 in.

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

                  Xu Bing Tobacco Project: Shanghai, Shanghai Gallery of Art, Shanghai, China, 2004

                  Tobacco project 3, Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Richmond, Virginia, USA, 2011

2000

Medium: Cardboard matches, printed with Robert Frost’s “Fire and Ice” (1920)

Size: Each: 1 5/8 x 1 3/4 in.

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

                  Xu Bing Tobacco Project: Shanghai, Shanghai Gallery of Art, Shanghai, China, 2004

                  Tobacco project 3, Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Richmond, Virginia, USA, 2011

2000

Medium: “American Spirit” brand cigarette boxes, artist’s father’s medical records, plastic desk calendar frame

Size: 7/8 x 7 1/2 in.

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

                  Tobacco project 3, Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Richmond, Virginia, USA, 2011

Materials：Book, Silkworm.

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

2020

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

1987－1991

Medium: Mixed media installation/ hand-printed books and scrolls printed from blocks inscribed with ''false'' characters

This four-volume treatise, produced over four years, was made with thousands of meaningless characters that look like Chinese, each designed by the artist in a Song-style font that was standardized by artisans in the Ming dynasty. For the immersive installation, the artist hard-carved over four thousand moveable type printing blocks. The meticulous, exhaustive production process and the work’s format, arrayed like ancient Chinese classics, were such that audiences could not believe that these exquisite texts were completely illegible. The work simultaneously invites and denies the viewer’s desire to read the work.

As Xu Bing has noted, the false characters “seem to upset intellectuals,” inspiring doubt in received systems of knowledge. Many early viewers pored over the artwork, obsessively looking for real characters. 

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, in a gallery or museum space. Desks are arranged 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 titled ''Elementary Square Word Calligraphy Instruction,' is played on a monitor in the exhibition space, capturing the audiences' attention and inviting them to participate in the class. Once they are seated at the desks, the audience is instructed to take up 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 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 artist's belief that people must have their routine thinking attacked in this way. 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.

2001

Medium: mixed media installation/ silkworm

Location: Eslite Gallery, Taipei, Taiwan

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 use Chinese characters in their language systems - Japan, Korea, and China. Xu's work focuses on the idea 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, does battle with a demon and finds himself losing. Using the magical method of ''shen wai shen'' (which in modern terms could roughly be translated as self-cloning) Monkey takes a strand of his own hair and puts it in his mouth, thereby releasing thousands of miniature replicas of himself that do battle with and defeat the demon. 

Using Chinese, Japanese and Korean, respectively, to write out this passage from the tale, the artist displayed the three versions on separate panels mounted on the wall, with each character inscribed on its own small, square notebook. Audience members were invited to freely tear off sheets of characters, unexpectedly revealing underneath a word written in a different language. This random mixing resulted in a scrambling of languages within one narrative, like different texts jumbled together in a computer error, or the cacophony resulting from different languages being spoken at once. At other times the random mixing of words regained a kind of normalcy and coherence. 

On the back of each sheet of paper was inscribed Xu Bing's personal website address: http://www.xubing.com. One implication of the work is the notion that through Internet technology one can attain something of the magical capacity for self-generation displayed in the story. 

1992

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

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 appear to be traditional, in fact each is a contemporary text designed to be incomprehensible by the reader. The 600 volumes are piled on an enormous reading table measuring 56ft x 12ft, serving as fractured emblems of two cultured systems of knowledge. On the wall above the table is a large sign reading ''QUIET.'' The audience is invited to sit at the table and peruse the books. The contrast of the ordered public reading space, presided over by the warning of QUIET, with the chaos of the information-less books laid on the table in a scattered and turbulent fashion evokes strong cultural implications. 

1992－1993

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

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

This installation is comprised of 300 specially printed and bound volumes titled “Post Testament.” The content of the books is a strange, hybrid text. The King James’ version of the New Testament was combined with a trashy contemporary novel by alternating each word of the two 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. The artist attempts to experiment with the relation between avant-garde literature and visual art.