Background
Xu Bing was born in 1955 in Chongqing, China. He grew up in Beijing, where his father was the head of the history department at Peking University.
2004
Room S01:13, National Museum Cardiff, Cathays Park, Cardiff CF10 3NP, United Kingdom
Artist Xu Bing is applauded by Wales First Minister Rhodri Morgan after collecting the Artes Mundi prize in Cardiff, for his work 'Where Does The Dust Collect Itself?'. Using dust collected near Ground Zero, the artist used the dust to cover the floor which was punctuated by a Chinese verse: "As there is nothing from the first, where does the dust collect itself". Photo by Barry Batchelor.
2013
Cromwell Rd, Knightsbridge, London SW7 2RL, United Kingdom
Chinese artist Xu Bing stands alongside his new installation at the V&A Museum in London, which has transformed the John Madejski Garden into an ethereal Arcadia inspired by the classic Chinese fable Tao Hua Yuan (The Peach Blossom Spring). Photo by Stefan Rousseau.
2014
9 Justice Dr, Admiralty, Hong Kong
Ronnie Chan Chi-chung, Chairman of Asia Society Hong Kong; Robert Miller, Xu Bing, and Chantal Miller attend a press conference about Miller's donation to Asia Society with HKD$1m to promote HK's emerging talent in the Arts, at Asia Society, 9 Justice Drive, in Admiralty. Photo by K. Y. Cheng.
2014
Bakewell DE45 1PP, United Kingdom
Artist Xu Bing views his work Tao Huan Yuan: A lost village Utopia in front of Chatsworth House which is part of the annual Sotheby's monumental scuplture exhibition 'Beyond Limits' at Chatsworth House on September 4, 2014 in Chatsworth, England. The work is part of the Beyond Limits exhibition of modern and contemporary sculpture displayed in the gardens of Chatsworth by Sotherby's between 8th September to 26th October 2014. Photo by Christopher Furlong.
2004
Room S01:13, National Museum Cardiff, Cathays Park, Cardiff CF10 3NP, United Kingdom
Artist Xu Bing is applauded by Wales First Minister Rhodri Morgan after collecting the Artes Mundi prize in Cardiff, for his work 'Where Does The Dust Collect Itself?'. Using dust collected near Ground Zero, the artist used the dust to cover the floor which was punctuated by a Chinese verse: "As there is nothing from the first, where does the dust collect itself". Photo by Barry Batchelor.
2005
Chinese-American artist Xu Bing standing behind calligraphy.
2007
Brooklyn, New York, United States
Artist Xu Bing is photographed on May 31, 2007, at home in Brooklyn, New York. Photo by Pascal Perich.
2007
Brooklyn, New York, United States
Artist Xu Bing is photographed on May 31, 2007, at home in Brooklyn, New York. Photo by Pascal Perich.
2013
Cromwell Rd, Knightsbridge, London SW7 2RL, United Kingdom
Chinese artist Xu Bing stands alongside his new installation at the V&A Museum in London, which has transformed the John Madejski Garden into an ethereal Arcadia inspired by the classic Chinese fable Tao Hua Yuan (The Peach Blossom Spring). Photo by Stefan Rousseau.
2014
9 Justice Dr, Admiralty, Hong Kong
Ronnie Chan Chi-chung, Chairman of Asia Society Hong Kong; Robert Miller, Xu Bing, and Chantal Miller attend a press conference about Miller's donation to Asia Society with HKD$1m to promote HK's emerging talent in the Arts, at Asia Society, 9 Justice Drive, in Admiralty. Photo by K. Y. Cheng.
2014
9 Justice Dr, Admiralty, Hong Kong
Xu Bing poses for a picture in front of his artwork in the exhibition of "It Begins with Metamorphosis" by Xu Bing at Asia Society, Admiralty. Photo by Felix Wong.
2014
Bakewell DE45 1PP, United Kingdom
Artist Xu Bing views his work Tao Huan Yuan: A lost village Utopia in front of Chatsworth House which is part of the annual Sotheby's monumental scuplture exhibition 'Beyond Limits' at Chatsworth House on September 4, 2014 in Chatsworth, England. The work is part of the Beyond Limits exhibition of modern and contemporary sculpture displayed in the gardens of Chatsworth by Sotherby's between 8th September to 26th October 2014. Photo by Christopher Furlong.
2015
2201 C St NW, Washington, DC 20520, United States
Xu Bing was awarded the 2014 United States Department of State Medal of Arts by Secretary Kerry.
2017
144 W 65th St, New York, NY 10023, United States
Screenwriter Zhai Yongming and artist-director Xu Bing attend the 55th New York Film Festival - "Dragonfly Eyes" at Elinor Bunin Munroe Film Center on October 8, 2017, in New York City. Photo by Jamie McCarthy.
2018
8 Huajiadi S St, Wangjing, Chaoyang, Beijing, China
Filmmaker Anthony LaMolinara (left) and Xu Bing (right).
2018
Beijing, China
Artist Xu Bing leads Federal President Frank-Walter Steinmeier through his studio. Photo by Britta Pedersen.
8 Huajiadi S St, Wangjing, Chaoyang, Beijing, China
In 1977, Xu Bing started studying at Beijing’s Central Academy of Fine Arts (CAFA). After graduation in 1981, he did a stint of teaching before receiving his Master of Fine Arts there in 1987.
(Xu Bing creates contemporary artworks using Chinese calli...)
Xu Bing creates contemporary artworks using Chinese calligraphy and other traditional Chinese media placed within unexpected settings. Erickson, a specialist on contemporary Chinese art, elucidates clearly Bing's iconoclastic and irreverent work, relating it to themes Bing has used elsewhere in his career. This volume accompanies an exhibition held at the Sackler Gallery in Washington DC in 2001. It will be of interest to artists and those interested in the use of word and image in contemporary art.
https://www.amazon.com/Art-Xu-Bing-Without-Meaning/dp/0295981431/?tag=2022091-20
2001
(Since its founding seven years ago by Pace Foods heiress ...)
Since its founding seven years ago by Pace Foods heiress Linda Pace, ArtPace has become one of the premiere foundations for contemporary art. An artist residency program based in San Antonio, Texas, ArtPace's goal is to give artists time and space in which to imagine new ways to work. Each year, nine artists (three from Texas, three from other areas of the United States and three from abroad) are invited to the foundation to create new work. Selected by guest curators the likes of Robert Storr and Okwui Enwezor, the list of artists who have undertaken residencies at ArtPace is impressive, prescient and diverse, including Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Annette Messager, Tracey Moffatt, Xu Bing, Nancy Rubins, Cornelia Parker, Inigo Manglano-Ovalle, Glenn Ligon, Kendell Geers, Carolee Schneemann, Mona Hatoum, Isaac Julien, Arturo Herrera, and Christian Jankowski. Dreaming Red includes illustrations of all the works created at ArtPace since its inception, an essay by art historian Eleanor Heartney, short essays on selected artists by the guest curators, including Cuauhtémoc Medina, Lynne Cooke, Chrissie Iles and Judith Russi Kirshner, and a lengthy essay on the personal history of the foundation and its founder.
https://www.amazon.com/Dreaming-Red-Creating-Xu-Bing/dp/1888302003/?tag=2022091-20
2003
(The works in On the Edge represent the reactions of leadi...)
The works in On the Edge represent the reactions of leading Chinese artists to encounters with the West. Some are contemplative musings on the space that opens up when one culture is observed from the vantage point of another. Others are more confrontational comments on Western dominance in the process of globalization. Some take strategic advantage of an outsider position. Each is symptomatic or expressive of the relationship between China and the West.
https://www.amazon.com/Edge-Contemporary-Chinese-Artists-Encounter/dp/988980865X/?tag=2022091-20
2005
(Hung Liu: Great Granary is the story of one of China's pi...)
Hung Liu: Great Granary is the story of one of China's pioneering women artists, whose groundbreaking 1981 mural "Music of the Great Earth" (at Beijing's Central Academy of Fine Art) is revered by a generation of Chinese artists, including Xu Bing, Sui Jianguo, Liu Xiaodong, Yu Hong, Wei Lin and Li Songsong, all of whom contribute to this celebratory monograph.
https://www.amazon.com/Hung-Liu-Granary-Jianguo-Sui/dp/988189073X/?tag=2022091-20
2011
(The new works that Xu Bing is presenting for the first ti...)
The new works that Xu Bing is presenting for the first time in this exhibition address the language that these two projects have avoided: the Chinese language, in particular its essential pictographic qualities, and explores the ways in which these have defined Chinese people's relationship with nature, culture and particularly with art.
https://www.amazon.com/Landscape-Landscript-Nature-Language-Bing/dp/1854442694/?tag=2022091-20
2013
(Xu Bing makes epic, language-based sculptures, books and ...)
Xu Bing makes epic, language-based sculptures, books and installations that are frequently inspired by China’s rich heritage of print culture and bookmaking. This beautifully designed volume records his acclaimed work “Tianshu” (or “Book from the Sky”). “Tianshu” consists of four volumes of unreadable “Chinese” characters printed in a traditional Chinese style from 4,000 hand-carved pieces of wood type. (The number of invented characters was based on the actual number of characters in common usage in China.) It took Xu Bing four years to carve the type and create the characters for this extraordinary work, which he first conceived in 1986 as “a book that no one would ever be able to read.” The volume includes Xu Bing’s own account of the work’s genesis, as well as extended commentary by a range of scholars.
https://www.amazon.com/Xu-Bing-Tianshu-Passages-Making/dp/0955085292/?tag=2022091-20
2015
(The Phoenix, the mythical bird that crosses civilizations...)
The Phoenix, the mythical bird that crosses civilizations and eras, has a central role in the artist's latest productions. Xu Bing’s Phoenixes - made of random common materials used in building construction - are allegories of the tremendous changes that occurred in China since the opening of the country and illustrate the contrasts within its "renaissance." Xu Bing will be unveiling his new Phoenix at the 2015 Venice Biennale this May. His piece will be located over the water between two boathouses at the Pavilion at Arsenale - Giardino delle Vergini.
https://www.amazon.com/Xu-Bing-Phoenix/dp/9881607922/?tag=2022091-20
2016
(A puzzle, a work of art, and a collection of classic Amer...)
A puzzle, a work of art, and a collection of classic American songs, all in an innovative book by one of the world's foremost contemporary artists. Every page of this book is filled with secret code. It seems like Chinese calligraphy, but it’s not. It seems like you can’t read it, but you can. Once the pieces of the puzzle start falling into place, you will understand it all. And some of it may even strike you as strangely familiar. Twelve traditional American songs, such as "Take Me Out to the Ball Game" and "Yankee Doodle," as well as five classic songs from Chinese culture, are written here in artist Xu Bing's unique "square word calligraphy," which uses one-block words made of English letters. From a distance, these pieces are beautiful but unintelligible art. Up close, they are a mystery just waiting to be solved - like the fine art version of "Magic Eye." For readers ages 7 and up, Look! What Do You See? is perfect for long car rides or coded notes to friends. Incredibly intricate and visually engaging, this is a book that children and adults will return to again and again.
https://www.amazon.com/Look-What-Do-You-See/dp/0451473779/?tag=2022091-20
2017
(Following his classic work Book from the Sky, the Chinese...)
Following his classic work Book from the Sky, the Chinese artist Xu Bing presents a new graphic novel - one composed entirely of symbols and icons that are universally understood. Xu Bing spent seven years gathering materials, experimenting, revising, and arranging thousands of pictograms to construct the narrative of Book from the Ground. The result is a readable story without words, an account of twenty-four hours in the life of “Mr. Black,” a typical urban white-collar worker. Our protagonist's day begins with wake-up calls from a nearby bird and his bedside alarm clock; it continues through tooth-brushing, coffee-making, TV-watching, and cat-feeding. He commutes to his job on the subway, works in his office, ponders various fast-food options for lunch, waits in line for the bathroom, daydreams, sends flowers, socializes after work, goes home, kills a mosquito, goes to bed, sleeps, and gets up the next morning to do it all over again. His day is recounted with meticulous and intimate detail and reads like a postmodern, post-textual riff on James Joyce's account of Bloom's peregrinations in Ulysses.
https://www.amazon.com/Book-Ground-point-MIT-Press/dp/0262536226/?tag=2022091-20
2018
(Aimed at a global community of librarians, publishers, an...)
Aimed at a global community of librarians, publishers, and readers, this book offers models of how to reimagine contemporary artists’ bookmaking as a socially engaged, political practice. With essays by Kurt Allerslev, Tia Blassingame, Sarah Kirk Hanley, FLY-O, Karen Eliot, Richard J. Lee, Florencia San Martín, Ganzeer, Suzy Taraba, Stephen Dupont, Bridget Elmer, Janelle Rebel, Marshall Weber, Anton Wurth, Xu Bing, Deborah Ultan and Aaron Sinift, Freedom of the Presses enacts the dialogue it calls for, inviting artists and activists to weigh in on the place of artists’ books in the most pressing social, political and cultural issues of our time.
https://www.amazon.com/Freedom-Presses-Artists-Twenty-First-Century/dp/0692166785/?tag=2022091-20
2019
徐 冰
artist calligrapher printmaker
Xu Bing was born in 1955 in Chongqing, China. He grew up in Beijing, where his father was the head of the history department at Peking University.
Xu Bing was relocated to the countryside from 1975 to 1977 as part of Mao Zedong’s movement to send urban youths to work in rural areas for “re-education.” In 1977, he started studying at Beijing’s Central Academy of Fine Arts (CAFA). After graduation in 1981, he did a stint of teaching before receiving his Master of Fine Arts there in 1987.
At the invitation of the University of Wisconsin-Madison, Xu Bing moved to the United States in 1990 and remained there for 18 years. He received a MacArthur Fellowship in 1999, presented to him for his “originality, creativity, self-direction and capacity to contribute importantly to society, particularly in printmaking and calligraphy.” In 2008, he was appointed CAFA’s vice president and thus returned to Beijing. After a six-year term, he gave up his vice presidency, and now advises the academy’s doctoral students as a professor. He also serves as a professor-at-large at Cornell University.
Xu Bing’s work has been shown at the Museum of Modern Art, New York; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; the Arthur M. Sackler Gallery, Washington, District of Columbia; Spencer Museum of Art, Lawrence, Kansas; the British Museum, London; the Victoria and Albert Museum, London; Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Spain; the Joan Miro Foundation, Spain; Museum of Contemporary Art Australia, Sydney; Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney; National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa; National Gallery of Prague, Czech Republic; and Museum Ludwig, Cologne. Additionally, Xu Bing has participated in the 45th, 51st and 56th Venice Biennales, the Biennale of Sydney, and the Johannesburg Biennale amongst other international exhibitions.
Over the years, Xu Bing’s work has appeared in major Art History textbooks such as Art Past, Art Present by David Wilkins (Pearson Prentice Hall, 1997), and Gardner's Art through the Ages: A Global History by Fred S. Kleiner (Wadsworth Publishing).
In April 2015 Xu Bing was appointed as an A.D. White Professor-at-large by Cornell University. He currently lives and works in Beijing and New York.
(Hung Liu: Great Granary is the story of one of China's pi...)
2011(The new works that Xu Bing is presenting for the first ti...)
2013(Aimed at a global community of librarians, publishers, an...)
2019(Following his classic work Book from the Sky, the Chinese...)
2018(Xu Bing makes epic, language-based sculptures, books and ...)
2015(A puzzle, a work of art, and a collection of classic Amer...)
2017(Since its founding seven years ago by Pace Foods heiress ...)
2003(Xu Bing creates contemporary artworks using Chinese calli...)
2001(The Phoenix, the mythical bird that crosses civilizations...)
2016(The works in On the Edge represent the reactions of leadi...)
2005A, B, C...
1991Cultural Negotiations
1992Post Testament
1993Silkworm Book
1994Tobacco Project: Redbook
2000Tobacco Project: Tobacco Book
2000Your Surname Please
1998Monkeys Grasp for the Moon
2001The Foolish Old Man Who Tried to Remove the Mountain
2001Excuse Me Sir,Can You Tell Me the Way to Asia Society?
2001Art for the People
1999Living Word 2
2002Wild Zebra
2002Medium: Mixed media installation
2003Air Memorial
2003Bird Language
2003Ergo Dynamic Desktop
2003The Glassy Surface of a Lake
2004Where Does the Dust Itself Collect?
2004The Horse Keeps Running
2008Stone Path
2008Purple Breeze Comes from the East
2008Xu Bing Phoenix
2010Travelling to the Wonderland
2013After the Tiananmen Square Protests of 1989, Xu Bing's recent work came under scrutiny from the government and received harsh criticism for what was perceived as a critique of the Chinese government. Due to the political pressure and artistic restrictions of the post-Tiananmen period in China, Xu Bing, like many of his contemporaries, moved to the United States in 1990.
Xu Bing is known as a bold artist who questions the status quo and rattles existing cultural assumptions and world-views. Many of his most thought-provoking pieces contemplate the relationships between language and meaning, reality and unreality, East and West, as well as tradition and modernity.
In his project Book from the Ground, Xu Bing bypassed the need for language and used icons and emojis to tell the story of 24 hours in the life of a typical white-collar urbanite. The emoticons form lines on the page, just like the printed type. Regardless of their linguistic or cultural background, viewers can easily comprehend this pictorial storytelling style through images that transcend verbal language.
The postmodern, deconstructive characteristics of Book from the Sky and Book from the Ground are also clearly embodied in Dragonfly Eyes. In the film, the artist often playfully but thoughtfully challenges the audience’s conceptions of reality, rationality and the notion that, in this day and age, we are constantly under surveillance.
The existence of today’s near-omniscient mass surveillance systems, in Xu’s view, provides humans with a new lens through which to understand the truth. Throughout the course of human history, people have claimed to witness many bizarre or incredible things, but can do nothing to prove their verity. Xu believes that the security camera network gives humans a chance to record and later view history in its entirety, creating a more accurate version of oral and written historical records.
There is no information on Xu Bing ever being married or having children.