Xu Bing

Xu Bing (b. 1955) is internationally recognized as one of the most important artists emerging from China’s New Wave art movement of the mid 1980s, and, indeed, among the most significant artists of his generation.  Xu came to prominence through his early masterpiece Tianshu (Book from the Sky, 1989), for which the study book and exhibition scroll A Mirror to Analyze the World (1988; Lots 145 and 146) are early documentary records.  In this early work, the artist created thousands of false Chinese-like characters and printed them in book and scroll formats on a mystifyingly voluminous scale.  Since that time the artist has pursued a number of related strands of inquiry while language and its representation have remained at the core of his interests.  Sotheby’s is delighted to offer a range of exemplary works by Xu Bing that embodies the variety and virtuosity of his artistic practice.

The woodblock print on paper entitled Softening the Brush (Lot 147; 1996) recalls one of Xu’s earliest works, Five Series of Repetitions (1987), which was his Master of Fine Arts thesis work in the printmaking department at Beijing’s prestigious Central Academy of Fine Arts.  As with Five Series, Softening the Brush is an elaboration of the woodblock printing process.  The work is comprised of a series of nine imprints, all carved from the same block of wood, moving from left to right and from dark to light as the artist successively carves new imagery from the wood and prints each stage of development.  Although Softening the Brush tells the apparently simple story of preparing an ink brush for use, Xu’s characteristic sense of humor emerges in the Magritte-like juxtaposition of the printer’s ink with the calligraphic ink referenced by the work, and in the hardness of the woodblock technique deployed with the would-be softness of its avowed main character.  Deceptively simple like much of Xu’s oeuvre, Softening the Brush narrates its own creation, and, with its reference to the preparations of an artist and to his own early work, it is a clever cipher for the artist’s own development.

Xu’s New English Calligraphy, of which Lots 148 and 151 are exquisite examples, was developed in 1993 and has since played an important role in his artistic expression.  Fusing written English with the appearance of Chinese characters, Xu alters and arranges Roman letters into a so-called “square word” format that remains legible, if purposefully challenging, to readers of English.  If the Book from the Sky sought to perplex even Chinese-speaking viewers with its deceptive formal pretensions to legibility, his New English Calligraphy moves in the opposite direction:  at first illegible, the works slowly reveal their meaning, breaking down cross-cultural barriers in communication even as they demand the English viewer/reader’s awareness of his or her own linguistic preconceptions.

Although Xu Bing’s cross-cultural experience serves as a basis for his work (he immigrated to the United States in 1990), his passage through the Cultural Revolution was also formative, but in a way that is somewhat different from many of his New Wave peers.  The words inscribed on the four overtly traditional silk hanging scrolls of Lot 151 are drawn from a 1942 speech of Chairman Mao to the Yan'an Forum on Literature and Art, in which the role and purpose of the artist and the arts are defined.  We instinctively recoil from an ideological program that narrowly proscribes – and brutally enforces – an explicit role of servitude for the artist.  But there is also something compelling, even enchanting in the optimistic world re-imagined in Xu’s inscription and by which he has inspired.  Despite the tragic consequences of a failed revolution, and Xu’s own experience of worker relocation at its hands, he is among those artists for whom the spirit of Mao’s words (if not the letter of their law) continues to have meaning – a welcome contrarian stance to the mercantilist motivations so prevalent in the present day.  And if Xu’s New English Calligraphy levels the field of past cultural production, re-envisioning Meng Haoran’s famous Tang Dynasty poem (Lot 148) with the same formal strategy applied to the Quotations from Chairman Mao series, it is with an appreciation of the fact that China’s richly varied history is the ever-present palimpsest upon which the radical transformations of the present era are inscribed.