Reality Trek
Ann W. Lloyd
Xu Bing joined Kiasma¹s Nepal trip thinking it would echo a pivotal experience in his life when, as an art student in China during the 1974 Cultural Revolution, he was Œsent down¹ to the countryside. Westerners assume this government-enforced re-education was punitive; so why relive it? Side-stepping ideology, Xu Bing simply answers that his time spent with peasant farmers in China allowed him to know the strength and spirit, the lives and concerns, of "real" people; more importantly, to make art that might matter to them. Years later, (and particularly, perhaps, after a decade of being embraced by the international art world) a trek through the Himalayas looked to Xu Bing like a prescriptive dose of that same reality. This attitude is at the heart of what makes Xu Bing an extraordinary artist. His work is still a paradoxical blend of ideas that are conceptually brilliant while being cunningly, sincerely, aimed at popular appeal. Even Xu Bing¹s early wood block prints, made directly after his "sent down" experience reflect this dichotomy. The representational subject matter of these lovely prints is landscape reduced to intricate patterns of seasonal cycles, fields and crops. The prints themselves, joined together in long scrolls, were made with an innovative, sequentially carved and inked, wood block matrix using methods both conceptually process-oriented and cyclically labor intensive, much like the lifestyle it celebrated. Xu Bing¹s roots in print making, with its inherently counter-elitist affinity for wide distribution, also inform his works. By the mid-1980s, he had completed formal art training at Beijing¹s prestigious art academy and begun teaching there. But he fretted that the establishment-sanctioned social realism he was then depicting in his work had little consequence to either the Chinese people or higher intellectual pursuits. About this same time, softening policy toward the West led China to allow an unprecedented influx of Western publications. Xu Bing was exposed to Western philosophy, Modernism, and art movements like Minimalism, Conceptualism and Pop. Concurrently, the government¹s rapid shifts in propaganda brought home the disjunction between experienced reality and various political versions. Language and texts, instruments of both truth and delusion, became Xu Bing¹s fertile new ground. He retreated to his studio, and after a year of intense labor, in 1988 produced his first major conceptual work, A Book from the Sky. When it was shown at the National Fine Art Museum in Beijing that year, the project established his reputation as one of China¹s avant-garde, New Wave artists. This huge, hand-printed, multi-part work was a complex, obsessive, meditation on historicized written language, textual information and printed media. It contained multiple 80 foot-long swooping sutras, or historical banners, slung across the gallery ceiling; walls tacked full of contemporary Chinese newspaper-like texts, and a floor full of traditional, exquisitely hand-bound Chinese books. All were printed with over 4000 precisely hand carved Chinese characters that Xu Bing had made himself. Traditionalists who first viewed the works delighted in his craftsmanship, but then slowly realized the carefully wrought characters were meaningless. Xu Bing had labored prodigiously to produce utter nonsense, enraging many. One bureaucrat from the Chinese Ministry of Culture angrily denounced this absurd display by comparing Xu Bing¹s work to the wanderings of a lost soul, "a ghost pounding the walls."
Ghosts Pounding the Wall was, consequently, Xu Bing¹s next work; also his first participatory/performance piece. Volunteers helped him lay inked sheets of paper on a large section of China¹s Great Wall, and, by pounding it, create a monumental impression. These giant prints, along with Book from the Sky, were Xu Bing¹s first works shown in the West, at the Elvehjem Museum in Madison, Wisconsin, U.S.A. in 1991. In the nine years since his debut in the West, Xu Bing has lived mostly in New York, but travels frequently to China. His work has been shown throughout the U.S., Europe and Asia, but exposure in his homeland has been limited to transitory, usually one-day, projects. One of these, wryly titled A Case Study for Transference, involved his first use of live animals two mating pigs -- and a group of invited intellectuals who became his unwitting subjects. The pigs had been inked up with more of Xu Bing¹s nonsense characters, the female with faux Chinese, the male with Roman letters spelling pseudo words. The pigs romanced inside a pen atop a book-strewn floor, while, outside the pen, the academics watched and excitedly discussed. Discerning theoretical subtexts in what was essentially earthy, barnyard activity seemed to unnerve the high-minded humans. "All these people came to the art activity and became very awkward during the mating," Xu Bing recalls. "The pigs were very cool, very focused, and when the piece was finished, the pigs were just the same, but not so the people." Xu Bing has since used talking parrots that expound on modern art; busy silk worms that completely obscure laptop computers, books and other informational devices with their gossamer spinnings; and long, poetically scripted tethers that lead viewers as they read along to docile sheep attached at the far end. These sly, smart yet whimsical efforts joust at the ineffable ties between language and nature, mind and body, and at the ultimate paradox of animal/human identity embedded in our consciousness. But the artist also knows that few can resist a live animal in an unlikely setting. A nomadic existence in the past few years has also fed Xu Bing¹s work. Language barriers are difficult but, as usual, he makes work out of frustration, turning it into source. His museum and gallery-sited classes in New English Calligraphy utilize an invented parallel language system that blithely borrows the form of written Chinese, along with the arcane (to Westerners) aesthetic traditions that honor it. Using traditional Chinese art-calligraphy methods, inks, papers and tools, Xu Bing gives lessons in the fine art execution of his hybrid characters. Though the pictographs look authentically Chinese at first, each one is actually a complete English word. Several together make a sentence. Following multiple performances of these classes, Xu Bing now occasionally receives letters from former pupils, painstakingly written in his "Chinglish." (He has also devised Spanish and German versions -- any language using the alphabet can be easily converted and a computer program that prints the characters is in the works.) Xu Bing¹s trip to Nepal, however, fails to fit neatly into any of his previous conceptual ploys. A young art student¹s first-time experience of the countryside, it turns out, is not repeatable. Xu Bing, now a citizen of the world, found he no longer "saw" ordinary peasant people as he had twenty-five years ago. "When I first arrived in Katmandu, I was at a loss. I realized my eyes had changed, they had turned into the kind of eyes Westerners have when they go to China, or when they look at a third-world country," he laments. Xu Bing¹s empathic vision, though, was not impaired. His brochures and collection box are both a social action and a conceptual project; they tackle a very real issue, perhaps quixotically, but with something more than proselytizing, more than gesture. Through his elegant, subtle and fine-tuned sensitivity, Xu Bing furnishes an experience, a model, an example, and an action through which viewers and participants can both express themselves and come to a more acute knowing.
(Ann Wilson is an American independent art critic who writes international reviews and features for the New York Times newspaper, Art in America Magazine, The Atlantic Monthly, and other American art publications. She lives in Boston, Massachusetts, U.S.A., and has written extensively atbout Xu Bing's work)
Ann W. Lloyd
Xu Bing joined Kiasma¹s Nepal trip thinking it would echo a pivotal experience in his life when, as an art student in China during the 1974 Cultural Revolution, he was Œsent down¹ to the countryside. Westerners assume this government-enforced re-education was punitive; so why relive it? Side-stepping ideology, Xu Bing simply answers that his time spent with peasant farmers in China allowed him to know the strength and spirit, the lives and concerns, of "real" people; more importantly, to make art that might matter to them. Years later, (and particularly, perhaps, after a decade of being embraced by the international art world) a trek through the Himalayas looked to Xu Bing like a prescriptive dose of that same reality. This attitude is at the heart of what makes Xu Bing an extraordinary artist. His work is still a paradoxical blend of ideas that are conceptually brilliant while being cunningly, sincerely, aimed at popular appeal. Even Xu Bing¹s early wood block prints, made directly after his "sent down" experience reflect this dichotomy. The representational subject matter of these lovely prints is landscape reduced to intricate patterns of seasonal cycles, fields and crops. The prints themselves, joined together in long scrolls, were made with an innovative, sequentially carved and inked, wood block matrix using methods both conceptually process-oriented and cyclically labor intensive, much like the lifestyle it celebrated. Xu Bing¹s roots in print making, with its inherently counter-elitist affinity for wide distribution, also inform his works. By the mid-1980s, he had completed formal art training at Beijing¹s prestigious art academy and begun teaching there. But he fretted that the establishment-sanctioned social realism he was then depicting in his work had little consequence to either the Chinese people or higher intellectual pursuits. About this same time, softening policy toward the West led China to allow an unprecedented influx of Western publications. Xu Bing was exposed to Western philosophy, Modernism, and art movements like Minimalism, Conceptualism and Pop. Concurrently, the government¹s rapid shifts in propaganda brought home the disjunction between experienced reality and various political versions. Language and texts, instruments of both truth and delusion, became Xu Bing¹s fertile new ground. He retreated to his studio, and after a year of intense labor, in 1988 produced his first major conceptual work, A Book from the Sky. When it was shown at the National Fine Art Museum in Beijing that year, the project established his reputation as one of China¹s avant-garde, New Wave artists. This huge, hand-printed, multi-part work was a complex, obsessive, meditation on historicized written language, textual information and printed media. It contained multiple 80 foot-long swooping sutras, or historical banners, slung across the gallery ceiling; walls tacked full of contemporary Chinese newspaper-like texts, and a floor full of traditional, exquisitely hand-bound Chinese books. All were printed with over 4000 precisely hand carved Chinese characters that Xu Bing had made himself. Traditionalists who first viewed the works delighted in his craftsmanship, but then slowly realized the carefully wrought characters were meaningless. Xu Bing had labored prodigiously to produce utter nonsense, enraging many. One bureaucrat from the Chinese Ministry of Culture angrily denounced this absurd display by comparing Xu Bing¹s work to the wanderings of a lost soul, "a ghost pounding the walls."
Ghosts Pounding the Wall was, consequently, Xu Bing¹s next work; also his first participatory/performance piece. Volunteers helped him lay inked sheets of paper on a large section of China¹s Great Wall, and, by pounding it, create a monumental impression. These giant prints, along with Book from the Sky, were Xu Bing¹s first works shown in the West, at the Elvehjem Museum in Madison, Wisconsin, U.S.A. in 1991. In the nine years since his debut in the West, Xu Bing has lived mostly in New York, but travels frequently to China. His work has been shown throughout the U.S., Europe and Asia, but exposure in his homeland has been limited to transitory, usually one-day, projects. One of these, wryly titled A Case Study for Transference, involved his first use of live animals two mating pigs -- and a group of invited intellectuals who became his unwitting subjects. The pigs had been inked up with more of Xu Bing¹s nonsense characters, the female with faux Chinese, the male with Roman letters spelling pseudo words. The pigs romanced inside a pen atop a book-strewn floor, while, outside the pen, the academics watched and excitedly discussed. Discerning theoretical subtexts in what was essentially earthy, barnyard activity seemed to unnerve the high-minded humans. "All these people came to the art activity and became very awkward during the mating," Xu Bing recalls. "The pigs were very cool, very focused, and when the piece was finished, the pigs were just the same, but not so the people." Xu Bing has since used talking parrots that expound on modern art; busy silk worms that completely obscure laptop computers, books and other informational devices with their gossamer spinnings; and long, poetically scripted tethers that lead viewers as they read along to docile sheep attached at the far end. These sly, smart yet whimsical efforts joust at the ineffable ties between language and nature, mind and body, and at the ultimate paradox of animal/human identity embedded in our consciousness. But the artist also knows that few can resist a live animal in an unlikely setting. A nomadic existence in the past few years has also fed Xu Bing¹s work. Language barriers are difficult but, as usual, he makes work out of frustration, turning it into source. His museum and gallery-sited classes in New English Calligraphy utilize an invented parallel language system that blithely borrows the form of written Chinese, along with the arcane (to Westerners) aesthetic traditions that honor it. Using traditional Chinese art-calligraphy methods, inks, papers and tools, Xu Bing gives lessons in the fine art execution of his hybrid characters. Though the pictographs look authentically Chinese at first, each one is actually a complete English word. Several together make a sentence. Following multiple performances of these classes, Xu Bing now occasionally receives letters from former pupils, painstakingly written in his "Chinglish." (He has also devised Spanish and German versions -- any language using the alphabet can be easily converted and a computer program that prints the characters is in the works.) Xu Bing¹s trip to Nepal, however, fails to fit neatly into any of his previous conceptual ploys. A young art student¹s first-time experience of the countryside, it turns out, is not repeatable. Xu Bing, now a citizen of the world, found he no longer "saw" ordinary peasant people as he had twenty-five years ago. "When I first arrived in Katmandu, I was at a loss. I realized my eyes had changed, they had turned into the kind of eyes Westerners have when they go to China, or when they look at a third-world country," he laments. Xu Bing¹s empathic vision, though, was not impaired. His brochures and collection box are both a social action and a conceptual project; they tackle a very real issue, perhaps quixotically, but with something more than proselytizing, more than gesture. Through his elegant, subtle and fine-tuned sensitivity, Xu Bing furnishes an experience, a model, an example, and an action through which viewers and participants can both express themselves and come to a more acute knowing.
(Ann Wilson is an American independent art critic who writes international reviews and features for the New York Times newspaper, Art in America Magazine, The Atlantic Monthly, and other American art publications. She lives in Boston, Massachusetts, U.S.A., and has written extensively atbout Xu Bing's work)