Xu Bing

signed and dated Two Thousand And Two, framed under Plexiglas

Generally in very good condition.
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Two months ago, in January 2008, Xu Bing accepted an invitation to return to Beijing in the powerful role of Vice President of his alma mater, the Central Academy of Fine Arts. He had left China for the United States in 1990, spurred by the controversy surrounding his iconoclastic installation, the Book from the Sky (Tianshu, 1987-91). This monumental masterpiece had been widely interpreted as critical of Chinese culture, particularly the nonsense policies of the recent decade-long Cultural Revolution, hence the controversy. In the United States, where he lived mostly in New York, he established his career as a prominent international artist renowned for his profound intellectual and humanitarian concerns, ingeniously and elegantly conveyed through his art.

 

The four works offered here, The Living Word (Lot 1151), Calligraphy Couplet (Lot 1150), Quotations from Chairman Mao (Lot 1152) and Holding the Brush (Lot 1153), all are the product of Xu Bing's life long fascination with language, and his investigation into how our reliance on language—particularly the written word—greatly impacts our lives. Born in 1955 to a librarian and a Beijing University history professor, he was immersed in the culture of books from an early age. He became so enthralled by the look of printed text that he collected examples of different type fonts, cutting out bits of newspaper text to arrange in a book. During the Cultural Revolution (1966-1976), he wrote large signs and didactic "blackboard" texts for his school, but also became familiar with the power of language to harm, when he learned of his father's denunciation via a publicly displayed sign. Over subsequent decades of visiting and living in different societies with different languages, his relationship to language has continued to evolve, and his appreciation of the power of language to influence our thought patterns has grown increasingly sophisticated.

 

As an artist, Xu Bing has shown himself to be a highly innovative creator able to adapt his medium and approach to convey complex and original intellectual concepts most often fused with a humanitarian point of view. The three major awards he has received underscore his significance as artist, intellectual, and humanitarian. The first of these, presented by the MacArthur Foundation in 1999, was granted in recognition of Xu Bing's ". . . originality, creativity, self-direction, and capacity to contribute importantly to society, particularly in printmaking and calligraphy." In 2003 he was awarded a prestigious Fukuoka Asian Arts and Culture Prize, the award committee stating that his "groundbreaking works enhanced the presence of contemporary Asian Art in the international arena. His artistic stance, which is deeply rooted in his own culture and yet always infused with the possibility for creative leaps, has become a guiding force to fellow contemporary artists in Asia." Four years ago, Xu Bing received the first Artes Mundi (Arts of the World; National Gallery and Museum in Cardiff, Wales) prize, one of the largest monetary awards to be offered to an individual artist, and one which "focuses on artists who are . . . producing work which adds to our understanding of the human condition."

 

In 1977 Xu Bing joined the first post-Cultural Revolution class of the Central Academy of Fine Arts, where he was assigned to the Print Department. The study of print-making brought him a familiarity and ease with working with a wide variety of materials, which later proved invaluable in his career as a multi-media artist. Combining his talent as a print artist with his love of language, Xu Bing created his early masterwork, Book from the Sky, perhaps the most important twentieth-century work of Chinese art. The title refers both to a set of four books, and to an installation of sets of the books, plus scrolls and wall panels. All of these are printed with characters that look like genuine Chinese characters but that are the invention of the artist.

 

When Xu Bing exhibited Book from the Sky in the United States after emigrating there, he observed the awe in which many Westerners held the Chinese language. Seeking a way to demystify it, in 1994 he invented a new style of writing, Square Word Calligraphy. Calligraphy Couplet, Quotations from Chairman Mao and Holding the Brush all make use of this invention. Although Square Word Calligraphy appears to employ Chinese characters, text rendered in this manner is in English. While Chinese-literate viewers expect to be able to read it, they cannot. Conversely, English-literate viewers discover to their surprise that, with a little effort, they can make out the letters and words. As it presents a puzzle requiring a shift in mental gears, Square Word Calligraphy acts much as a Zen koan or riddle. Xu Bing values the change in thought patterns. He has said, "In the space between understanding and misunderstanding, as concepts are flipped, customary modes of thought are thrown into confusion . . . . It is by opening up these unopened spaces that we may revisit the origins of thought and comprehension."[i]

 

Xu Bing has found many varied applications for Square Word Calligraphy, converting it to a computer font, engraving it in seals (chops), producing a Square Word Calligraphy Classroom complete with special instructional books, and so on. Holding the Brush is based on an illustration from the instructional book Introduction to Square Word Calligraphy, printed as a woodcut. The work comprises a series of woodblock prints all pulled from the same block, at different stages in its carving. They are printed in a progression from nothingness (a black rectangle printed from the uncarved block) to the fully realized image. Xu Bing had used this device earlier, while still at the Central Academy, producing his acclaimed group of Series of Repetitions prints. The image of a hand holding a brush is topped by the statement "holding the brush," which is at first unintelligible because it is written in Square Word Calligraphy. The combination of the straightforward image with comprehension-defying text calls to mind René Magritte's painting The Treachery of Images (La trahison des images) (1928-1929) depicting a pipe under which is inscribed the sentence, "This is not a pipe" (Ceci n'est pas une pipe).

 

A decade after leaving China, and having achieved international stature as an artist, Xu Bing turned to seriously questioning the purpose of art. It seemed that contemporary art was often treated as an elitist game understood by few. Why create art, and for whom? Xu Bing found answers pertinent to our times in a text that had been central to all debates on art during the Maoist era, Mao Zedong's 1942 "Talks at the Yanan Forum on Literature and Art." He rendered passages from this text in Square Word Calligraphy as impressive sets of hanging scrolls, Quotations from Chairman Mao. The set presented here reproduces a passage in which Mao berated artists for creating works that could be understood only by a small elitist group, saying that to do so was self-centered and harmful to society:

 

"If, for instance, you reproach the masses for their utilitarianism and yet for your own utility, or that of a narrow clique, force on the market and propagandize among the masses a work which pleases only the few but is useless or even harmful to the majority, then you are not only insulting the masses but also revealing your own lack of self-knowledge. A thing is good only when it brings real benefit to the masses of the people."[ii]

 

Having invented Square Word Calligraphy, Xu Bing's is the world's leading practitioner, and his calligraphy in this mode has become increasingly fluid and sophisticated over the years. This is evident in Calligraphy Couplet, a wish for a healthy bright future and joyful success inscribed on the red paper traditionally used with such couplets for good luck.

 

In 2001, Xu Bing's groundbreaking solo exhibition, Word Play: Contemporary Art by Xu Bing, opened at the Arthur M. Sackler Gallery, Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D. C. The exhibition had the distinction of being the first major solo show the nation's Asian art museum had accorded a living artist. Xu Bing created several major new pieces for the exhibition, including The Living Word, an enchanting installation that greeted visitors at the entrance to the exhibition. Simultaneously playful and profound, The Living Word reflects Xu Bing's life-long fascination with language—with both the freedom it provides as a tool for communication and reasoning, and the limitations it brings as a medium that may preclude non-verbal thought, not to mention the harm it can do as the primary vehicle of propaganda. The artist's previous works had stressed either the positive or the negative: with The Living Word Xu Bing expressed the full range of humankind's relationship to its essential invention.

 

The Living Word is visually anchored on the floor with the dictionary definition of the Chinese word for bird, niao, replicated in gray acrylic characters. The dry text states that niao stands for a "kind of vertebrate animal, warm-blooded and oviparous, using lungs to breathe, completely covered with feathers, able to walk on its hind legs, and the majority having forelimbs evolved into wings, and able to fly." Approximately four hundred bird characters rise in a graceful spreading arc from there to the ceiling, morphing from the contemporary simplified style adopted during the Maoist era, through historical variations stretching back thousands of years, to their ancient origin as pictographs. As the acrylic "birds" soar from their lifeless position of entrapment on the dictionary page upwards, the characters' color shifts from gray to violet, running then through rainbow shades of blue, green and yellow to finish with the most natural bird shapes rendered in vibrant orange.

 

A hallmark of Xu Bing's oeuvre is his use of a playful touch to open the minds of his audience to profound concepts. Even though the work depends upon the historical development of the Chinese language, the concept Xu Bing means to convey is apparent to anyone, from any cultural background with a written language. Catching the light, the vividly hued "birds" of The Living Word are a source of visual delight, infused as they are with life and beauty: they lure the viewer to a deeper understanding of the role of language in our lives.

 

In addition to its inaugural installation in the Sackler Gallery, The Living Word has been exhibited in the Shanghai Art Museum (the 4th Shanghai Biennial, 2002) and the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art in Humlebaek, Denmark (Made in China: Chinese Art Now!, 2007).

 

[i] Britta Erickson, The Art of Xu Bing: Words without Meaning, Meaning without Words (Washington, D.C./Seattle: Arthur M. Sackler Gallery/University of Washington Press, 2001), pp. 18-19.

[ii] Mao Zedong, Talks at the Yanan Forum on Literature and Art, 4^th ed., 3^rd rev. translation (Beijing: Foreign Languages Press, 1965), p. 24