Xu Bing: Art That Examines Society — and Asks Where That Impulse Came From

An icon of Chinese contemporary art has opened his retrospective.

From mid-July to mid-October, at the UCCA Center for Contemporary Art (UCCA) in Beijing, the 63-year-old artist Xu Bing has on show nearly all of his major works. The route runs along a timeline, so visitors walk through a kind of corridor of time, following his work from the 1970s to the present.

For 40 years Xu Bing has been making and staging games that challenge fixed habits of thought: deformed characters, visual tricks, transformations between the tiny and the monumental. He made his name with Book from the Sky (《天书》), built out of more than 4,000 invented "Chinese characters," and became an icon of Chinese contemporary art.

Games are not the whole of him. The art historian Wu Hung argues that Xu Bing thinks and works one piece at a time: each series takes on a different question, and the questions come from his sharp eye for the small details of his era.

Apart from the 17 years he spent in the United States from 1990, Xu Bing has lived in Beijing. The Anti-Rightist Campaign, the Cultural Revolution, the culture fever of the 1980s, Reform and Opening, the Olympics — he missed none of them, and each left its shadow in his work. He keeps circling back to the question of where he came from, trying to mark out his own path honestly and with humor, while feeling for where he might still go.

Xu Bing talks constantly about fate. His work, the shape of his knowledge, his view of who art is made for — he traces all of it back to things that happened to him decades ago. His life lacks the designed quality that so many successful people like to stress. Yes, he "wanted to be a painter since childhood," but when both the Central Academy of Fine Arts (CAFA) and the Beijing Film Academy wanted him, where he landed was simply the outcome of talks between the two schools. When it was time to pick a major he "insisted on oil painting," then accepted an assignment to printmaking — he had not even caught the hint the dean of academic affairs dropped about transferring departments. The craft and the thinking of printmaking shaped his early work directly.

When he tells these stories, his language is plain and direct, full of detail and free of pose.

The poet Zhai Yongming met Xu Bing at a gathering in Berlin in 2004 and later became his partner in work and in life. She thinks he "is not the kind of genius people usually picture": "He isn't Mozart, born already able to play the piano. There are flashes of genius in how Xu Bing thinks, in his methods, even in the work itself — but his gift also carries a strong element of effort. And he isn't arrogant about his talent the way many geniuses are."

In fact, though he is thought of as prolific, most of his works took years of preparation to grow from an idea into a finished object.

1

In 1986, about to graduate from CAFA, Xu Bing decided to make a book "that nobody could read." The idea "kept him excited for months."

His connection to books runs deep. Both his parents taught at Peking University; his mother came from the department of library science. Living with them in the faculty housing, Xu Bing met some of the country's most important intellectuals, and many of his teachers at the middle school attached to Peking University had been labeled Rightists during the Anti-Rightist Campaign and sent down to teach.

Yet growing up among intellectuals did not give him a systematic education. The Down to the Countryside movement cut off his secondary schooling; he and several classmates were sent to Shouliangou village to work the land and paint blackboard newspapers. In this village in northern Hebei — a place said to have gone unnoticed even by the invading Japanese army — Xu Bing found an unpolished code of conduct. Sometimes it was unconditional trust: he still remembers a girl sitting outside a courtyard with no clothes on, calling out to him as he passed at a distance. Sometimes it was sudden rejection: after a portrait he painted "made the man look dead," the village elders stopped asking him to paint.

Away from the city he also came across folk customs that had not yet been swept away: writing "ten thousand taels of gold" or "wealth and treasure come" as a single compound character, or using "ghost talismans" to speak with the underworld. This meeting and exchange between orthodox and unorthodox systems of knowledge fascinated him, and it runs through his work.

Making Book from the Sky, the former "educated youth" turned himself into the man with no culture. He wanted to play a joke on culture, and chose a conspicuously cultured way to do it: after combing through the Kangxi Dictionary, he invented more than 4,000 new characters that obeyed the rules of Chinese character construction, cut them into blocks in Song typeface, and printed them on three kinds of paper to make 120 sets of books. He went to see the veteran craftsmen at a factory that printed ancient texts to study the texture and the "temperament" of different papers, so the finished books would be as exacting as possible: "precise, rigorous, meticulous."

Unfolded one sheet at a time in a carefully lit room, the faint differences in the paper's color react beautifully with the light. A viewer feels the solemnity of a book at once, and can pick out the parts of a book — volume order, titles, colophons, annotations — without recognizing a single character. Xu Bing noticed that some elderly professors and editors found this especially hard to bear; they searched compulsively for even one real character, because "walking into that room runs directly against everything they had done their whole working lives."

Book from the Sky set off heated argument, but Xu Bing refused to join in interpreting it. What interested him was the pleasure of working with the pure form of words and books. Recalling how he cut the blocks, he wrote: "The fine blade opens the fresh surface of the wood, and every cut is a decision. It is a conversation with material, one that exists only between us."

Like much of what he made later, Book from the Sky took its material from a particular political and cultural setting and was shown inside it, but had no interest in a direct political statement. What it cared about was the look of politics, and the fact of looking cultured.

Xu Bing is often counted as a man of the 1980s. That was the decade of culture fever: the intellectual world hungrily took in newly unbanned Western modern thought, while the art world charged ahead in a storm of its own. From the Stars Art Exhibition of 1979 to the '85 New Wave, art was treated both as an experiment in culture and as an ideological vanguard. The wave crested in 1989, when the China/Avant-Garde exhibition became the showcase for a generation of young artists — and was shut down in a hurry amid chaos.

Xu Bing was not one of its central figures. The show's most striking image was the giant "No U-Turn" sign in front of the National Art Museum of China; its most jarring sound was the shot Xiao Lu and Tang Song fired at their own installation, Dialogue. Those symbols set the key of progress, while Book from the Sky was more like noise inside it, knocking against the era's fever for culture.

Book from the Sky was finished at last in 1991. Xu Bing says he "spent four years making something that said nothing at all." By then his life had changed a good deal: in 1990 he was invited to the United States, with no idea when he would be able to come back.

2

On September 11, 2001, eleven years into his time in the United States, Xu Bing took a call from his foreign assistant and stepped out of his studio in Brooklyn, New York. A plane crossed low over Upper New York Bay and struck the south tower of the World Trade Center, across the water from the studio. Watching the smoke pour up after the towers fell, Xu Bing could not find "the horror one was supposed to feel" — "it was too much like a Hollywood blockbuster."

A few days later he collected a bag of dust belonging to 9/11 in Lower Manhattan. Three years after that, in a gallery at the National Museum of Wales, he blew the dust into the air; over 24 hours it settled to the floor, spelling out a translation of two lines from a Zen verse: Fundamentally there is not a single thing — where could dust alight?

Xu Bing rarely depicts an event so directly. His material usually comes from things, and from the cultural life behind things: writing, the Great Wall, cigarettes. "The world had changed" is how he describes the shock of 9/11. This more world-conscious Xu Bing is not quite the man who was absorbed in carving characters in the late 1980s; he had adapted to a more international art world, and could seize a chance to explain his motive to foreigners: "because more than a hundred ethnic Chinese died in that event."

For a long stretch he lived in a basement at 52 East 7th Street in Manhattan's East Village. His first roommate was Ai Weiwei; later he received Chen Kaige, Zhang Yimou and Tan Dun, and put up Yu Hong and Liu Xiaodong for a while. His first job was to finish Book from the Sky; then he went to a small town in South Dakota to learn Western hand-bookmaking. He carried on the work he had begun at home, using writing and books as the handle for his art, and stayed active in the circle of friends formed by his contemporaries living abroad.

At the same time he explored America carefully and with curiosity. The East Village was considered the birthplace of New York punk; homeless men doing performance art, Allen Ginsberg living there with his boyfriend — these subcultural markers filled his daily life. In a restaurant he once met a finely dressed old woman whom young people kept bringing flowers to; he tried to talk to her in his still halting English and could not understand a word of the reply. Only later did he learn she was Quentin Crisp, the British writer and gay icon.

Surveillance and cross-dressing, those Western symbols, did not enter his work formally until Dragonfly Eyes in 2017, where he used them to sketch an increasingly modern China. In the America of the 1990s and 2000s, Xu Bing, like the other Chinese contemporary artists picked up by international galleries, was mainly expected to tell a good China story. But his angle was somewhat different: what he wanted to show was what happens when East and West meet.

For that he chose some strikingly theatrical means. He once printed fake Chinese characters and fake English all over two pigs and let them mate in full public view; he threw cigarettes, poetry and the Along the River During the Qingming Festival scroll at one another, East against West, and built out of the collision a sprawling Tobacco Project about the way a manner of living travels across borders.

In 1993 Xu Bing began Square Word Calligraphy. The trick of this "calligraphy" is to bend the letters of an English word into shapes that look like Chinese radicals, then fit those components — which are also still letters — into one square character. Each newly made square character stands for one English word, and common syllables such as "ing" recur in the same form.

Xu Bing believes Square Word Calligraphy could only have been born abroad. It let him use his practiced hand with writing while touching a more universal question. He wanted to challenge fixed ideas about writing and language, and to break down the line between ideographic and phonetic scripts. Words fused into square characters lose reading speed but gain the visual beauty of Chinese characters. He used the method to design his own English signature.

Square Word Calligraphy and the earlier Book from the Sky produced an ironic result: Xu Bing himself became a case study in the meeting of East and West. In 2000 he was invited to appear on stage with the French philosopher Jacques Derrida. Many scholars like to explain his work through Derrida's difficult theory of deconstruction. At the event itself, Xu Bing could not follow Derrida's dense phrasing or his French-accented English.

To this day he has never finished a book by Derrida. Zen interests him far more, especially D. T. Suzuki, another thinker much admired by the artistic young of his generation. He has his own explanation: he is not put off by the mysticism of Eastern thought, but is unused to the circling of Western thought.

3

In 2007 Xu Bing came home. That January he took on a commission: a sculpture for the glass atrium of Beijing's World Financial Center. It became Phoenix.

A great deal happened in China that year. After a run of accidents and disasters, the Beijing Olympics opened. Cai Guo-Qiang, two years younger than Xu Bing, set off 29 giant fireworks "footprints" along Beijing's central axis, striding all the way to the stage at the center of the national celebration. This was the moment China announced its rise, and as proof, Beijing's central business district (CBD) had entirely remade the capital's skyline.

What Xu Bing set out to make was a sculpture completely at odds with the CBD's architectural key. He began collecting construction waste and laborers' tools from the CBD and spent two years piecing them into a pair of phoenixes, each 8 meters tall, then covered them with LED lights. In daylight the rust-caked birds look rather ugly; when the LEDs come on, the sculpture turns a little gaudy.

The phoenix is a folk totem in China; the construction waste marks Xu Bing's concern for people at the bottom. He was shocked by the contrast between the CBD's luxury office towers and the plank shacks on its building sites, and the migrant workers moving between the two were, in the words of a China News Service report, like "the excrement of the city's most respectable district."

That may be exactly why the World Financial Center refused Phoenix in the end: China's financial centers did not yet have the nerve to take in a satire of themselves.

Many people knew little about his decade and more abroad; their picture of him stopped at Book from the Sky. Phoenix showed them a very different Xu Bing: sharper, more direct in criticizing the world in front of him. The writer Li Tuo saw Phoenix as a landmark case of art colliding head-on with capital. The leftist position it marked made Xu Bing an outlier among the 1980s generation of artists, who preached individual liberation: a contemporary artist who could still call out that art is for the people.

Xu Bing brings up the influence of the 1970s often; that stretch of his life also fills the largest part of his book My True Words (《我的真文字》). This is how he describes going back to Shouliangou village for the last time after his admission to CAFA: "This plain place with the smell of earth in it, steeped in folk wisdom and humor, this place whose rhythm suited my own body. One last chance to 'enjoy' the hardship, because I knew I was leaving — I began to treasure every day left in the village."

That influence began to show as early as the 1980s. Studying at CAFA, he felt a particular closeness to the woodcuts of Gu Yuan, who was best at revolutionary and socialist-construction subjects — farmers reaping in the fields, for instance. Xu Bing felt he could understand Gu Yuan's art in a real way, "because I had lived inside the world of Gu Yuan's woodcuts."

Nor has he made a point of keeping his distance from the huge symbol of Mao Zedong. As a sent-down youth he often carried the Selected Works of Mao Zedong and came to know its language well. Many of his works call up utopia, or some idealist notion; but he has stressed on many occasions that studying Mao was not a personal taste but a duty for any artist trying to understand his era — just as American artists have to understand and represent the vulgarity of pop culture.

He calls himself slow on the uptake. When avant-garde figures like Bei Dao and Wang Keping were challenging tradition, he was only a bystander in the crowd; back in the classroom, he went on drawing plaster casts. Book from the Sky earned him the title of contemporary artist; but on the relationship between art and society he still seems to be that sent-down youth in Shouliangou village in the 1970s.

This lagging sense of identity has sometimes troubled him since he became famous. In 1999 he was invited to Nepal for an artists' project. Riding a rickshaw in Kathmandu, he suddenly felt something was wrong. "I stopped recognizing these eyes of mine. They felt like eyes I used to know well — the eyes of Western travelers in China. Eyes that hold themselves above whoever they are looking at, eyes hungry for the exotic."

4

Over the past year Xu Bing, who has just stepped down from his post at CAFA, has become very busy.

His new work, Dragonfly Eyes — a film made entirely from public surveillance footage — has screened at festivals around the world; his team put on two large retrospectives back to back, in Wuhan and Beijing, and took part in the Echigo-Tsumari Art Triennale for the first time; he has also kept up his ties with officialdom, showing French President Emmanuel Macron and his wife works made with the new English calligraphy at UCCA when Macron visited China this January. According to UCCA's press release, the two men "talked from Derrida to Yves Michaud and enjoyed it thoroughly," and Macron went on to recommend him to the president of the Centre Pompidou.

The press has come thick and fast as well. Xu Bing will book three interviews in a single afternoon, with the air of a student cramming homework on a Sunday night. He does not like going over the same topics again and again. Sometimes a visitor mentions having seen one of his works somewhere, and he is delighted.

After more than 40 years of work, Xu Bing has become a favorite of the public, the press and the intellectual world at once.

From July to August, Beijing held a dense run of seminars, dialogues and interactive events about him — a tribute from the intellectual and art worlds. Opinion on the new work, though, is divided. One art professional said flatly that nothing Xu Bing has made in recent years stands out much.

Dragonfly Eyes may be the least Xu Bing-like of his works. It drops the handle of writing altogether and instead uses a mass of surveillance video found online, cut together and redubbed, to tell the story of a young man who, obsessed with finding a woman called Dragonfly, has surgery to turn his own face into hers.

Telling that story with unrelated surveillance footage was enormously hard. But to some viewers Xu Bing has merely told a hackneyed love story, and the fine, painstaking detail of his earlier work is nowhere to be found in Dragonfly Eyes.

Xu Bing sees it differently. He wanted Dragonfly Eyes to take on the big subjects: technology, surveillance, the real. At the UCCA show, visitors can also watch surveillance feeds from places like pig farms on several laptops, the last of which shows a live picture of the very corridor the visitor is standing in. Xu Bing has told QDaily that what drew him to the film was that he was "looking for a working method that matches contemporary civilization."

Just as in the early years when Gu Yuan's influence ran deep in him, he still cares about how artistic form corresponds to society.

This year Xu Bing, who averages one work a year, has produced nothing new. He is a little unsure about his future working state, but if there is a next piece, he says he will still be someone who cares about the fate of society, and he will certainly look for a new way of speaking.

Unless otherwise noted, images in this article are courtesy of Xu Bing Studio; the cover image and banner image have been cropped.