Xu Bing

Xu Bing (born 1955) is a Chinese artist who served as vice-president of the Central Academy of Fine Arts.

He is known for his printmaking skills and installation art, as well as his creative artistic use of language, words, and text and how they have affected our understanding of the world.

He is an A.D. White Professor-at-Large at Cornell University.

Born in Chongqing in 1955, Xu grew up in Beijing.

His father was the head of the history department at Peking University.

In 1975, near the end of the Cultural Revolution, he was relocated to the countryside for two years as part of Mao Zedong's "re-education" policy.

Returning to Beijing in 1977, he enrolled at the Central Academy of Fine Arts (CAFA) in Beijing, where he joined the printmaking department and also worked during a short period of time as a teacher, receiving his master's degree in Fine Art in 1987.

After graduating with his degree in printmaking, the artist veered away and created simple but dramatic woodcuts, such as Shattered Jade (1977) and Bustling Village on the Water (1980–81, 繁忙的水乡).

In 1987, Xu Bing returned to his training in printmaking to create large and elaborate installation pieces like Book from the Sky (1987) and Ghosts Pounding the Wall (1990).

Xu Bing's Tianshu ("Book From the Sky") is a large installation featuring precisely laid out rows of books and hanging scrolls with written "Chinese" texts.

Even so, this work challenges our very approach to language because of the unique nature of the text written on the paper.

First presented in Beijing in 1988, the learned élite felt slighted by the artists' bold move to design and print over 4,000 characters that looked Chinese but were completely meaningless according to standard Mandarin.

Xu Bing infuses his work with meaning by stirring confusion and discomfort in his audience, mostly due to the fact that the Chinese characters used in these texts are not "real" characters.

After the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests, his recent work came under scrutiny from the government and received harsh criticism for what was perceived as a critique of the Chinese government.

This piece was well received in China until 1989, whereupon the social and political drama of the Tiananmen Square protests led the government to look askance at Xu Bing's Tianshu.

Due to the political pressure and artistic restrictions of the post-Tiananmen period in China, Xu Bing, like many of his contemporaries, moved to the United States in 1990 where he was invited by the University of Wisconsin–Madison.

In 1990–91, Xu had his first exhibition in the United States at the University of Wisconsin–Madison's Elvehjem Museum of Art (now Chazen Museum of Art) including his installations A Book from the Sky and Ghosts Pounding the Wall.

In Book from the Sky, the artist invented 4,000 characters and hand-carved them into wood blocks, then used them as movable type to print volumes and scrolls, which are displayed laid out on the floor and hung from the ceiling.

The vast planes of text seem to convey ancient wisdom, but are in fact unintelligible.

Using his background in print-making, in May and June 1990 Xu Bing and a team of art students and help from local residents began a monumental project: creating a rubbing from a section of the Great Wall at Jinshanling.

In order to create the rubbings, Xu Bing used entirely traditional Chinese methods and materials for stone rubbing, including rice paper and ink.

Measuring 32m x 15m, the resulting installation piece consists of 29 rubbings of different sections of the Great Wall.

As in the case of many of his works, Xu Bing directly related his colossal piece, Ghosts Pounding the Wall, to the political situation in China.

While surveying his work while installed at Elvehjem Museum of Art, Xu Bing said that his Great Wall represents "a kind of thinking that makes no sense and is very conservative, a really closed-in thinking that symbolizes the isolationism of Chinese politics."

The prints of the Great Wall rise up on either side of the exhibit, making the viewer seem small and insignificant in comparison to the massive, looming representations of solid stone walls.

Leaving China in 1991 for the political and artistic freedom of the United States, Xu Bing continued to explore and express his thoughts on deconstructing language to challenge our most "natural" cultural assumptions.

His thought-provoking work enticed Western audiences, and he soon became one of the leading artists in the modern Chinese art scene.

From 1994 he started a new project, in which he adapted Latin alphabets into the shape of hanzi.

He called this New English Calligraphy, and gave lessons in how to write the characters.

In his series Background Story, Xu Bing uses unusual materials in order to create a deceptively typical Chinese Scroll Painting.

He was awarded the MacArthur Fellows Program in 1999 and the Fukuoka Prize in 2003.

He received a MacArthur Foundation grant in July 1999, presented to him for "originality, creativity, self-direction, and capacity to contribute importantly to society, particularly in printmaking and calligraphy."

In 2003 he exhibited at the then new Chinese Arts centre in Manchester, and in 2004 he won the inaugural "Artes Mundi" prize in Wales for Where does the dust collect itself?, an installation using dust he collected in New York City on the day after the destruction of the World Trade Center.

The Glassy Surface of a Lake, a site-specific installation for the Elvehjem, was on view in 2004–05.

In this work, a net of cast aluminum letters forming a passage from Henry David Thoreau's Walden stretches across the museum's atrium and pours down into an illegible pile of letters on the floor below.

Working in a wide range of media, Xu creates installations that question the idea of communicating meaning through language, demonstrating how both meanings and written words can be easily manipulated.

He won also a half year of free work and study at the American Academy in Berlin 2004.

He then resided to the United States until his appointment as vice-president of the Beijing CAFA in 2008.

Xu Bing was appointed the new vice president of the Central Academy of Fine Arts, March 2008.

While at the Central Academy of Fine Arts Xu Bing mastered the Socialist Realism style of art so predominant during the Maoist era.