2017—

Lead Team: Xu Bing, Feng Yan, Zhang Wenchao, Sun Shining

Medium: Artificial intelligence generated film with variable duration

Time Length: Variable duration

Exhibition: The 5th Pingyao Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon International Film Festival, 2021 Museum of Art Pudong, 2021-2022

This project works closely with artificial intelligence scientists to develop a real-time feature film production artificial intelligence system that involves no human production personnel (directors, screenwriters, photographers, or actors, etc.). In this interactive exhibit, the audience can input their preferred film genre (such as science fiction, crime, romance, etc.) and customize the narrative plot or style of the movie by entering keywords or sentences, resulting in a unique AI-generated movie. This project aims to pursue an element that transcends human creation and fulfills a demand that is absent in traditional film. Its concept emerges from human biases, including narrow emotional perspectives, political and economic interests that breed greed and immorality, as well as limitations in knowledge that impose restrictions. AI suggests the “internal structure” of human life by accumulating various human image materials from a neutral standpoint. This project is largely an experiment of the future possibilities of AI film.

Trailer: https://vimeo.com/823196158?share=copy 

2003—ongoing

Xu Bing’s Book from the Ground, which he has been working on since 2003, is an ongoing exploration of communication and language. The project involves compiling symbols and pictograms from the public sphere and using them to create a book exclusively written in visual language. 

The uniqueness of Book from the Ground lies in its accessibility to any reader belonging to contemporary society. Regardless of one’s cultural or linguistic background, the book’s material can be interpreted and understood due to the universal nature of its visual symbols. This eliminates the need for translation and can be published anywhere.

For the Book fom the Ground installation, Xu Bing recreates the working environment of his studio. By bringing select materials from his studio, he symbolically suggests the continuous nature of the project as a never-ending exploration of visual communication. 

Furthermore, Xu Bing Studio also created a character database software that corresponds to the language of the book. Users can enter words either in English or in Chinese, and subsequently, the program will translate them into Xu Bing's lexicon of signs. It thus serves as an intermediary form of communication and exchange between the two languages. As personal computers and the internet become increasingly integrated into daily life, the lexicon of digital icons grows accordingly, and the symbolic language of Book from the Ground has been further updated, augmented, and complexified. In response to his own Book from the Sky (1988) whose language is completely illegible, Book from the Ground is contrastingly legible to all. It may be considered an expression of Xu Bing’s long-standing vision of a universal language.

2012: 17'

2012, 2015: 15'

Materials: seventeen-minute animated film 

This animation is conceived as a study and imagination of a calligraphy masterpiece by Zhao Mengfu (1254-1322) in the collection of Yahoo’s founder, Mr. Zhiyuan Yang. Through the medium of widescreen animation, The Character of Characters describes the source of the unique character of Chinese people. Everyone in China who has received basic education must, over the course of years, commit to memorize and then write and re-write thousands of characters, each character a drawing. This is the way things have been done over thousands of years in the Chinese history, so this must have had some influence on the formation of the character of Chinese people. It implies the way that Chinese people see and approach things, and why China is the way it is today – developing at this breakneck speed but not in line with the Western value system.

Chinese people’s worldviews and concepts of freedom; the consequences of Chinese people’s flexibility, collectivism, face-saving mentality, moral stance that demands focus on communal interests, and worship of symbols and big names; the ability of Chinese culture to digest other cultures, and the Chinese culture of copying (“shanzhai”). All of these special characteristics could be said to have a deep connection to the Chinese way of writing characters. This animation seeks to reveal the relation between Chinese writing and cultural characteristics, the core and energy of Chinese culture, and its advantages and disadvantages for people to continue to build new modes of human civilization.

 Supported by The Robert H. N. Ho Family Foundation.

2006

Medium: Digital Video

Three 30-second video art pieces created for the Nokia Connect to Art project. 

Nokia: Connect to Art consists of three video art pieces, each lasting for 30 seconds.

Xu Bing has expressed his preference for the hand-drawn quality of cartoons that evoke memories of his childhood, despite the revolutionization of computer-generated images that offer unparalleled beauty.

The notion is often propagated that art can only be considered as such when it lacks any practical function. Nonetheless, Nokia: Connect to Art acts as an antithesis to this statement by incorporating utility into its works. These art pieces will be as portable, existing on devices that accompany us everywhere, transcending physical space. Every interaction with technology will become a soulful exchange. 

Descriptions of individual works:

Flight: Birds don’t like that we have used this mark to represent them.

Growth: Chinese is fascinating in that drawing, painting and writing can be one and the same.

Return: Birds don’t have an opportunity to refuse their human explanation.