Xu Bing in "Beijing"

A pioneering Chinese contemporary artist, Xu Bing creates mixed-media installations that subvert viewers’ ways of thinking about language, cultural tradition, and the lessons of our past while pointing to the possibilities of our future. Shown at work in his Beijing studio, Xu constructs one of his Background Story installations, in which he places twigs, newspaper, and scraps of plastic behind frosted glass to create the illusion of a Song Dynasty landscape painting. Installed so that viewers can see both the beautiful landscape from the front of the glass and the means of its making from the back, Xu’s work asks viewers to reconcile their initial assumptions with what they actually see. A skilled calligrapher, Xu discusses his most famous works, Book from the Sky and Square Word Calligraphy, in which he creates what appear to be Chinese written characters from either meaningless text or English words. For his newest video work, the artist constructs a narrative film entirely from acquired surveillance-camera footage. Xu shares how the cultural and personal disruptions that are so common to Chinese people of his generation have inspired his work, explaining, “As an artist, you ask yourself: Can you channel your life experience through your artwork using whatever is unique to you, to create a new artistic language?”

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