In my contemporary art history class, we used Linda Weintraub’s In the Making: Creative Options for Contemporary Art. Weintraub describes, “Bing’s artworks direct viewers to forms of awareness that are not dependent on such products of the conscious mind as reason, belief, opinion, ideas, and even the imagination. Success for Bing depends upon undermining human’s attachments to thoughts, ideas, concepts, theories, and texts.”

Bing is a transdisciplinary artist using Chan Buddhism and language (often as calligraphy) to form a homogeneous entity that exists independently. [Note: the Chan school was the indigenous form of Buddhism in China, while Zen was the name in Japan.] He uses Buddhism to solve complex problems that the egoic mind cannot. Xu’s art focuses on transformation in the fields of the global economy, human surveillance, labor conditions, politics and propaganda, philosophy, psychology, sociology, history, and language. Xu is a print-maker, calligrapher, sculptor, author, videographer, filmmaker, and installation artist. He earned his BFA and MFA from the Central Academy of Fine Arts, Beijing, and later served as vice president. Today, he is a professor and director of the Academic at CAFA and a Cornell A.D. White Professor-at-large. He lives and works in Beijing and New York.

His first major work, Book from the Sky, was first exhibited in the National Art Museum of China, showing 4,000 characters in four volumes of 604 pages. It is considered an important part of the 1985 Fine Arts New Wave: the birth of Chinese contemporary art that characterized the broad liberalization movement in the years prior to the Cultural Revolution. In this work, we see where the traditional materials, crafts, and techniques take a backseat to the concept of arbitrariness of language and a desire to subvert the audience’s linguistic and cognitive expectations. There is no one who can read or comprehend this calligraphy, including Xu Bing. In 2020, these characters were painted on the Tianshu Rocket and became an invaluable contribution to the evolving realm of space art. This vessel continues to question the arbitrary nature of language and its limitations.

Xu Bing returned to China in 2008 as vice president of the Central Academy of Fine Art in Beijing. The World Finance Center was under construction and the developer asked Xu to produce artwork for the lobby. Instead of payment, Xu asked for a donation to CAFA. When he arrived at the construction site to look and make notes, he was horrified. The migrant workers were living in squalor while they worked on the site. The disparity between the ostentatious show of wealth and the extreme poverty was overwhelming. He used the debris he found on the site to make his art piece, a large flying bird inside a glass cage (the building), unaware that someone had trapped him in a cage. Xu hired the migrant workers themselves to build the artwork. After the piece, now known as Phoenix, began, the developer dropped the commission and Xu lost four months of work. It took two years to complete the pieces. There were four phoenixes built in all. Two were experimental, and Xu used two as linked versions. They bear witness to the complex interconnection between labor, history, commercial development, and a rapid accumulation of wealth in today’s China. They made the Phoenix to resemble Chinese folk art, where cheap materials are used to express hope for tomorrow. Xu showed Phoenix at the Venice Biennale in 2013.

Xu is an artist and a humanist seeking rational ways to solve human problems. As he said, “Our world and reality are ever-changing. There will always be something you’ll feel the need to express. You have to find a new way to say something that no one else has said before. So, you must continuously find a new way to speak.”

More information about Xu can be found on his website. See more on the Twenty-First Century and Brilliant Ideas. See the trailer for Dragonfly Eyes here.

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