Research Questions & Significance
In our contemporary age, where cultural and artistic exchange has been redefined in a post industrialist world of technology and globalization, “boundaries” of labeling art with distinct ethnic identities now face a moment of cultural dilemma. (Tsao and Ames, Cultural and Philosophical Reflections, xiiii) Navigating the narrowly defined cultural space of contemporary art, dominated by Western assumptions of ethnic integrity, modernity, and postmodernity, artists of “international” heritage and identity, their work, and our transnational consumption of such, beg important questions of modern artistic discourse. In understanding the identity of “modern” Chinese art, many recent contemporaries further introduced to international discourse in the face of artistic persecution post Cultural Revolution and Tiananmen Square protests, we must ask ourselves: what does it mean for art, especially that existing in an international forum to have an ethnic identity? What makes Chinese art influenced and engaged in multicultural visual traditions and conceptual mediums “Chinese”? Such questions suggest further examination of international Chinese art subjected to a singular ethnic identity, how neglecting a sort of “in betweenness” inherent in much of contemporary artistic discourse not only reinforces pseudo-Western, binary notions of the “other”, but also neglects their opportunity to dismantle cultural barriers and embrace an intercultural language of art. (Tsao and Ames, Cultural and Philosophical Reflections, xxiiii)
Xu Bing, and his work, a titan of this interculturality defining much of contemporary globalized artistic discourse offers a critical moment of reflection in understanding how art can instigate dialogue, further challenging preconceived notions of binary, ethnic identities. Suggesting a spectrum of transnational, translinguistic, and transcultural perception, Xu Bing imaginatively attacks one of the most formidable and intrinsic of barriers in his audience’s perspective: language. (Silbergeld and Ching, Outside in: Chinese x American x Contemporary x Art., 7) Grappling with and untangling the increasingly hybridized reality of our globalized world, Bing’s artistic dialogue challenges both visual and linguistic forums not only in the context of his own intercultural history, but also in intimate participation with his audience; proposing many questions about the consumption of contemporary Chinese art, and whether or not people in the West can learn to look beyond superficial Chinese characteristics to see what lies beneath. (Erickson and Bing, Words without Meaning, Meaning without Words, 10)
Historical Background & Intellectual Underpinnings
In better understanding the historical background and intellectual underpinnings not only of Xu Bing’s work, but also the broader, evolving discourse of contemporary Chinese art, I examine Bing’s personal history and its intersections with major political and social affairs within nineteenth through twenty first century China.
For the vast majority of audiences in the West, Chinese art is viewed almost exclusively as one of the past, a confined medium of traditional aesthetic and practice, often divorced from present artistic production and modern discourse. (Erickson and Bing, Words without Meaning, Meaning without Words, 7) However, while such, often pseudo-Western, perspectives fabricate a distant notion of Chinese art, these exoticized definitions have been incredibly challenged by recent artists, not only dismantling such otherized denotations, but also understandings of modern artistic debates in a pseudo-Western canon. Flaunting a penchant for new forms and materials, the reinvention of artistic languages and an expansion of major traditional mediums, practices, and presentations, experimental, contemporary Chinese art actually has deep roots that reach back to the 1970s of a revolutionized China. (Erickson and Bing, Words without Meaning, Meaning without Words, 7)
In the face of the Maoist regime, artistic, cultural, and historic persecution ironically reinvented spaces and avenues to conceptualize and expand the modern Chinese identity through the globalization of Chinese artistic production, such persecution resulting in dissemination of contemporary Chinese artists in the West and across the world. Experiencing surprising speed and numbers, new art and artists from China appearing in Western art establishments in the early 1990s pioneered a modern global understanding of a contemporary artistic identity previously subjected to distant, “traditional” aesthetics. (Erickson and Bing, Words without Meaning, Meaning without Words, 7)
Xu Bing, like many of his other contemporaries, immigrated to the United States in the 1990s following artistic persecution for his monolithic Book from the Sky, an exploration of written word perceived by authorities and many social forums as a political critique. However, such complicated relationships with cultural, artistic, and personal fabrics were not foreign to Bing pre-Tiananmen artistic persecution, his experiences growing up during the Cultural Revolution having profound impacts on his artistic and individual identity.
While contemporary Chinese art, intrinsically labeled Chinese in conjunction to the ethnic identity of authorship or “traditional” aesthetic, medium, and practice, Bing expresses that in reality, members of his generation were never truly educated in orthodox Chinese culture. (Erickson and Bing, Words without Meaning, Meaning without Words, 13) Much of what they learned was remolded by Mao Zedong, who had hoped to create a new Chinese coherence that dispensed the old. This sort of change formed an extremely important part of their cultural background, influencing their modes of thinking, expressing, and creating not only within their artistic discourses but also within their perceptions of self. While subjected to a singular ethnic integrity, the international forum and distinct cultural integrity of contemporary Chinese artists has constructed a particularly interesting reality not only for their identity but also the identity of their art. Such complex dialectics confronted by recent artists have established new modes of discourse: deemed Chinese by an international forum, yet divorced from longstanding traditional orthodoxies and enriched by a multicultural, global forum of their artistic endeavors.
Visual, Spatial, and Conceptual Analysis of Works
Book from the Sky
Book from the Sky, Book from the Sky: cont.
Xu Bing
Mixed Media Installation
Hand-printed books and scrolls
Image taken 2007, Original installation 1988
Asian Art Museum, Seattle, WA
Xu Bing’s Book from the Sky took him over 4 years to make and features more than 4,000 movable type blocks in the traditional woodcut printing style of the Song script standardized in the Ming dynasty. Visually parallelling traditional Chinese scrolls yet filled with meaningless characters echoing Chinese script, the Book from the Sky intimately engages the audience’s perceptions of language and thought not only in the context of Chinese dialects, but also their own. This sort of unifying quality, an impossible understanding felt by a variety of groups, most poignantly binary understandings of “East” and “West”, has an evolving meaning, its significance growing with the progression of time and its exhibited context.
In an immersive and enlightening visual display, the audience and space are eclipsed by such impossible glyphs in full occupation of horizontal and vertical reaches. Displayed on the floor, the walls, and composing a drapery like floating ceiling, viewers are invited to engorge themselves in the intimate details of the unintelligible script, an almost transcendent-like realm making one truly question the meaning of such all encompassing characters. In further viewing Book from the Sky, one can’t help but be impressed by the sincere and formal grandeur of the text, yet when introduced to such absence of meaning, the work challenges perception in a titillating cultural confusion, establishing a space where such language can be neither claimed nor understood by anyone.
As one of his first projects following the literati persecution of the Cultural Revolution and in close proximity to his Masters in Fine Arts from the Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing, Bing expressed how the Book from the Sky reflects his own personal experience with language, culture, and literature; pronouncing this feeling of a culture being turned upside down in the academic format of once contraband knowledge. As the child of two academics, Bing was familiar with books at a young age, however too young to read at the time; when he finally could read them Bing confronted the censorship of Mao’s Cultural Revolution. Such suppression and misunderstanding inspired an incredibly complex relationship between Bing and written word, embroiling his relationship not only with the reliability of language, but also its intimacy with knowledge and thought; an interdependence between words and being so tightly intertwined with each other and, simultaneously, broader notions of cultural and societal identity. (Erickson and Bing, Words without Meaning, Meaning without Words, 10)
Square Word Calligraphy: Your Surname Please
Xu Bing
Mixed Media Installation
Computers and Software
Image taken 2009, Original installation 1998
Fukuoka Asian Art Museum, Japan
In Xu Bing’s Square Word Calligraphy collection, Bing fabricates a hybridized model of English and Chinese language, transposing the English alphabet in the format of Chinese Kaishu style formal script. Harmonizing perceived “East” and “West” correspondents, Bing navigates a multicultural forum, questioning binaries of cultural identity and perception in the spectrum of a transcultural, translinguistic, and transgenerational world. Created after his move to the United States and finding himself, once again, in what felt like a space living between cultures, Bing’s Square Word Calligraphy collection returns to his investigation of written word with a notion of “cultural camouflage”. (Chiang, A New Voice for the Third Space Xu Bing and the Redefined Chinese American Art.) This mask, confusing audiences’ pre-established and imposed meanings of contemporary Chinese art’s singular ethnic, cultural, and linguistic identity, not only presents an incredibly enriched narrative of multicultural dialogue, but also Bing’s distortion of truth to highlight truth, such physicality promoting not what we perceive in the context of our pre established perceptions and consumption, but what its appearance signifies internally.
In Your Surname Please, an installation of Bing’s Square Word Calligraphy, audience members are invited to input their surnames into a computer interface, digitally rendering their English name in the hybridized calligraphic script. Surrounded by a wallpaper-like pattern of pre printed names and identities framing the digital interface, the crowd of surnames calls out to the viewer, begging for their participation and investigation of the mysterious script displayed on the solemn screen. Such physical and conceptual intimacy with the audience not only engages the viewer in Bing’s investigation and conversation with a spectrum of perspectives, but also simultaneously addresses evolving mediums with automated fabrication of venerated calligraphy in technological interface. This blurring of perceptions, indulging not only binary constructs of “East” and “West” but also of “modernity” and “tradition”, entices the audience, a hybrid of irreconcilables inviting us to question our assumptions of contemporary Chinese art and, more broadly, visual expectations or presumptions of identity itself. (Tsao and Ames, Cultural and Philosophical Reflections, 177) Highlighting profound notions of multiculturalism, Your Surname Please enriches the lives of people from across the world, the numerous printed names framing the inviting computer interface and reinforcing the multitude of identities, peoples, and names that form the exhibition itself.
Square Word Calligraphy: Art for the People
Xu Bing
Mixed Media Installation
H. 36 ft W. 9 ft
Image taken 2009, Original installation 1999
Victoria and Albert Museum, London
Another installation of Bing’s Square Word Calligraphic format, his Art for the People banner further suggests language’s provocative capacity; such hybridized forms of expression in international forum speaking to a transnational dismantling of stereotypical thinking, Bing’s trademark departure from the truth emphasizing truth itself again reinforced. Originally commissioned by the Museum of Modern Art in New York, Xu Bing’s banner Art for the People was a member of the museum’s “Project series”, a group of monumental banners by international artists, composing a prominent entrance display at the face of the building. An eye-catching red and yellow banner measuring 36 by 9 feet, Bing’s banner displays chairman Mao’s slogan “Art for the People”, echoing yet simultaneously investigating the power of art as a medium for communication. Its monumental and vibrant display trump the viewer and entrance, structuring its message in an inescapable call out to the audience, beckoning their sight down the doorways’ axial symmetry and dominating its visual frame with a saturated message and hue. Undoubtedly inspired by his personal and cultural history with censorship and propaganda, Bing’s Art for the People banner stimulates introspection and conversation of art as a creative vocabulary, transcendent of perceived divisions, a universally relevant and dynamic language.
Growing up during Mao’s Cultural Revolution with parents of academic and scholarly forums, Bing pioneered an identity in calligraphy and script as a form of escape. While his practice with script began at a very young age, his father requiring him to write a page of characters a day, his relationship with calligraphy reached new profundity in the persecution of the Cultural Revolution. Labeled “the bastard son of a reactionary father,“ his family background was polluted; his penmanship skills providing an avenue to overcome such persecution as a “writing tool.“ (Erickson and Bing, Words without Meaning, Meaning without Words, 16) Through cultural conditioning, Bing became intimately aware of the power of script, his Art for the People banner mirroring posters and leaflets he made in the Propaganda Office of the Maoist regime. Redefining and reimagining his relationship with calligraphy, and simultaneously their living and felt message, the Art for the People banner throws customary modes of thought into confusion, creating obstacles to connect pre-established slogans and modes of expression, and traversing unopened spaces to encourage the revisitation of origins of thought and comprehension. (Erickson and Bing, Words without Meaning, Meaning without Words, 19) In a complex world and international forum, such ideas of censorship are pervasive and not always explicitly defined; where art is often housed in the confines of prestigious, exclusive museums, Mao’s slogan “Art for the People” is given new meaning in Bing’s banner, presenting the universally relevant and dynamic language of art lived, felt, and animated by our universal artistic discourse and consumption.
Phoenix
Xu Bing
Phoenix
Construction site debris, steel beams, tools
L. 90 ft, W. 12 tons
Image taken 2014, Original installation 2008
The Cathedral of St. John the Divine
Displayed as a pair, Xu Bing’s feng and huang Phoenixes reference traditional zoomorphic symbolism and classical bronze construction, transposing their established motifs of rebirth and harmony and coveted artistic productions in a new industrial material and international forum. The installation’s unconventional medium compliments established motifs and artistic discourses, Bing’s use of site construction debris not only addressing a compelling narrative of potential in urbanization, but also the vitality of laborers’ efforts in the face of unjust working conditions and the environmental crises adjacent to industrialization and material demand. Such dazzling, monumental, and mystical creatures appear in true transcendence of space, their intricate details and workings recalling geometric motifs of fine dynastic bronzes, their vibrant colors enthralling the viewer with a wonder of materiality and form, their monumentality yet simultaneous airy flight forcing the viewer to stop and contemplate their profound beauty. Originally commissioned by the World Trade Center in Beijing and later traveling around the world, these two monumental sculptures took two years to build and weigh over 12 tons. They are displayed hanging from the ceiling, in mid-flight, their monumentality and contemporary medium juxtaposed against their traditional aesthetic and motifs.
These grand sculptures, contemplating traditional aesthetic with an industrialized medium and narrative, speak again to the many ways in which Xu Bing challenges perception; inheriting the exoticized notions of a distant, traditional Chinese art and reclaiming it, redistributing venerated, recognized motifs and aesthetics to instigate contemporary dialogues of modern discourse relevant to an industrialized world affecting us all. Such inheritance of traditional aesthetic, reinvented and given new creative energy, has been received in a global forum, being displayed in China, America, and Europe. (Jiehong, The Art of Contemporary China) The feng and huang Phoenixes not only speak to their zoomorphic subject’s established motifs of rebirth, but also the prestige and spirituality of Chinese bronze production. Mirroring visual attributes of bronzes created throughout dynastic China, these monumental sculptures promote dialogue not only of how tradition and artistic discourse are inherited, revived, and reproduced but also how art and manufacture exists in the context of our changing world. The recall of coveted aesthetic identity of dynastic bronzes gives the feng and huang Phoenixes inherent visual prestige, transposing these notions to their subject of overlooked entities: the migrant workers and environmental consequences of globalized industrialization.
Background Story: Thousand Li of River and Mountain
Thousand Li of River and Mountain
Xu Bing
Mixed Media Installation
Shadow box, plant material, debris
W. 10 meters
Image taken 2014
Beijing Minsheng Art Museum, China
Xu Bing’s Background Story collection employs traditional Shan Shui landscape painting as an avenue for commentary on the internal. His broader Background Story collection, a multitude of mixed media installations employing organic and manmade, urban debris are carefully displayed in the composition of a shadow box, their projected image presenting a strong visual familiarity of pristine, peaceful landscape paintings popularized throughout dynastic China. Once again challenging our perception with a camouflaged mask of truth and understanding, these mixed media installations have been an ongoing work and investigation of Bing’s, his original exhibition dating back to 2004, and his most recent debuting in 2023.
Thousand Li of River and Mountain, modeled after a painting from the Southern Song dynasty, much like his other Background Story works, presents a convincing replication of Shan Shui landscape paintings, a traditional medium and production interested in the fabrication of a pristine organic environment of sacredness, leisure, and harmonious theories of natural order and functions. The gentle glow framing the subtle iridescent and shadowed forms draw the viewer in, absorbed by the immersive yet distant serenity of the misty landscape, the audience is beckoned towards the piece, such intimate appreciation compelling the investigation of what lies beneath. Much like many of Bing’s works, his Background Story collection is not divorced from his “trademark” tactic of deceit. While its external face presents a convincing and replicative perception of traditional beauty and aesthetic, juxtaposed against the familiarity of its pristine mask is an accessible view of the shadow box’s internal workings; enriching the narrative through a visual and experiential dialectic, again questioning a spectrum of perception in the changing environment of our modern world.
Simultaneously acting as commentary on the transgenerational political project of defining an ideal falsely inherent in the organic world, Bing’s Background Stories negotiate traditional practices while concurrently addressing their artistic and social discourses innate in production. While traditional Shan Shui landscape paintings suggest ideals of “naturalness”, the general frame and political expectations of such organic depictions not only act as emblems of contemporaneous tastes, but also political and social networkings in the construction of an organic ideal. In navigating the modern construction of a natural purity in landscape painting replications, juxtaposing it with artificial mediums hidden behind their unpolluted projections, Bing’s Background Story speaks to a spectrum of understanding, fabrication, and the changing environment of our industrialized world. Again his art, while externally perceived as a subject of Chinese tradition, proposes a universal language and message speaking to the transnational, multicultural forum with a profound significance relevant to all.
Literature Review
My referenced works all present compelling arguments not only addressing Xu Bing’s art and the evolution of his artistic and social discourses, but also the broader forum of contemporary artists and multicultural identities. In better understanding the existence of a “third space”, a multicultural in betweenness defined by an international forum and investigation of transnational identities and perspective, these readings suggest contemporary art and the art of Xu Bing as an avenue for dialogue. Such resources and insights have enriched my personal and my project’s understanding of complex perspectives and discourses universally relevant and compelling, pertaining not only to the field of contemporary Chinese art but a broader understanding of art as a visual language.
In Britta Erickson and Xu Bing’s, The Art of Xu Bing: Words without Meaning, Meaning without Words, Erickson provides an extensive understanding of Xu Bing’s evolution as an artist navigating a multicultural identity between “tradition” and “modernity”: the impact of growing up in the Cultural Revolution, and his artistic and social life in America. Not only introducing an examination and understanding of Bing’s individual works, but also including a biographical chapter by Xu Bing himself, Erickson highlights the cultural quandaries defining Bing’s life, his ability to analyze his circumstances and represent them to others in universal terms demonstrating his work as catalysts for revolutionary creative ventures.
In Jerome Silbergeld and Dora Ching’s Outside in: Chinese x American x Contemporary x Art, Silbergeld and Ching question what is meant by titles of “Chinese”, “American”, and “contemporary art”, probing culture and diversity, and whether the assimilation or individualization of ethnic and cultural identities waters down roots of culture or undermines the authenticity of either. In examination of a plethora of artists, Silbergeld and Ching work to understand our sensibilities and modes of understanding complex identities that transcend binary definitions of ethnic and cultural subjugation.
In Hsingyuan Tsao and Roger Ames’s Xu Bing and Contemporary Chinese Art : Cultural and Philosophical Reflections, Tsao and Ames too question whether contemporary Chinese art can be confined to a singular Chinese ethnic identity, highlighting the broader cultural dilemma of contemporary art and whether the existence of such multicultural artistic identities and discourses truly function as a third place where binaries of “East” and “West” collaborate congruently.
In Ying Wang and Sun Yan’s Reinventing Tradition in a New World : The Arts of Gu Wenda, Wang Mansheng, Xu Bing and Zhang Hongtu, Wang and Yan investigate a globalized forum of culture and identity, enriching the lives of people from across the world. Simultaneously complimenting this notion of a modern, transnational discourse, Wang and Yan recognize the personal conflict and devaluation of work that is often the base of creating such international identities, aiming to investigate how such intercultural integrities are formed out of necessity in the face of artistic and cultural persecution or censorship.
In Joy Chiang’s “A New Voice for the Third Space Xu Bing and the Redefined Chinese American Art.”, Chiang investigates definitions of Chinese American art in a globalizing market; probing how art, especially contemporary art, can have an ethnic identity and whether confining artists and their work of diverse cultural integrity and discourse to a singular ethnic identity falsy diminishes a dialogue and exchange in our international world.
In Jiang Jiehong’s The Art of Contemporary China, Jiang investigates the meanings of tradition in a modern forum, questioning how tradition can be reborn, reinterpreted, and reinvented through creative paths and energy. In his investigation, Jiang pays careful attention to subjects of materiality, aesthetic, and authorship asking meaningful questions of how tradition evolves alongside its context.
Conclusions & Typological Foundations
In my analysis of these selected resources and Xu Bing’s works, I hope to better understand the ethnic identity of art particularly within the globalized forum of contemporary artistic discourses. In further investigation of such works and literature, I found the prospect of a multicultural heterogeneity of Chinese art and art as a whole to have a pervasive temporal, geographical, and cultural reach, enriching an understanding of art as a longstanding mode of communication between peoples and perceptions that can be extended beyond definitions of “Chinese” and “contemporary” to art itself.
In illustrating my investigation of Xu Bing’s art, I selected works in explicit forum and conversation with language, like his Book from the Sky and Square Word Calligraphy collection, complimenting them with works of artistic dialect, those navigating traditional representation as a sort of format and script of visual language like his Background Story collections and feng and huang Phoenixes. Organizing them in chronological order of their original exhibition and manufacture, I aimed not only to highlight Bing’s artistic evolution, but also how his art, progressively intersecting a growing international forum, worked to establish an important precedent for the future: a growing and evolving channel for dialogue that has been increasingly embraced within our contemporary artistic and cultural discourses. In this review of Xu Bing, his artistic expeditions, and his work as an avenue for transcultural, translinguistic, and transgenerational dialogue, I identified a new method of typological study: art as a language, a universally enriching and important medium of conversation addressing diverse perspectives and multicultural communion. While this universal understanding of art as a language is not meant to promote assimilation of integral and beautiful differences of our globalized forum, I believed it can help dismantle “otherized” notions within our current and future artistic discourses, accepting and celebrating the social, cultural, and perspectival reality of exchange that has defined artistic creativity and conversation for centuries.
Referenced Works & Additional Sources
Chiang, Joy. 2014. “A New Voice for the Third Space Xu Bing and the Redefined Chinese American Art.” New London, Conn: Connecticut College.
Erickson, Britta, and Bing Xu. 2001. The Art of Xu Bing: Words without Meaning, Meaning without Words. Washington, DC: Arthur M. Sackler Gallery.
Jiehong Jiang, The Art of Contemporary China (London: Thames & Hudson, 2021).
Silbergeld, Jerome, and Dora C. Y Ching. 2009. Outside in: Chinese x American x Contemporary x Art. New Haven, Conn.; Yale University Press.
Tsao, Hsingyuan., and Roger T. Ames. 2011. Xu Bing and Contemporary Chinese Art : Cultural and Philosophical Reflections. Albany: State University of New York Press.
Wang, Ying., and Sun. Yan. 2004. Reinventing Tradition in a New World : The Arts of Gu Wenda, Wang Mansheng, Xu Bing and Zhang Hongtu. Gettysburg: Gettysburg College.
