"Behind the Story: Taoyuan Xianju Tu", Pudong Art Museum, 2021
Phoenix 2021 Xu Bing Studio
"English Square Character Calligraphy Room" 2021 Pudong Art Museum ◎ Brother
Exhibition: Xu Bing's Language
Duration: Until August 23, 2022
Venue: Pudong Art Museum
"The Language of Xu Bing", which is currently on display at the Pudong Art Museum, is the largest solo exhibition of Xu Bing in China. In the exhibition, the artist's multiple identities— Chinese contemporary artists on the international stage, professors of the Central Academy of Fine Arts, etc. — disappear, and his works become the protagonists, while his well-known works, such as the Book of Heaven and the Book of Earth, become more three-dimensional because of the hidden veins.
The creation of "words"
Xu Bing's most widely disseminated work is probably his "Book of Heaven" from 1987 to 1991, which is also the first work seen when entering the exhibition hall.
In the rectangular space, three long scrolls hanging from the ceiling are printed with "characters" that look very much like ancient Chinese characters, and below them correspond to open "ancient books". There are more than 4,000 characters in these classic texts printed by the classic method of movable type printing, corresponding to the number of commonly used Chinese characters, which Xu Bing spent nearly four years after graduating from graduate school.
These elegant and classic characters resemble Chinese characters, but when carefully identified, none of them can be read, so when this work was exhibited in the 1990s, it attracted the criticism of many traditional people. And this is also the most interesting part of the work "Book of Heaven" at first glance, that is, the meaninglessness of these words.
The background of the creation of this work dates back to the artist's youth, after going to the mountains and going to the countryside, Xu Bing, who was admitted to the Central Academy of Fine Arts, was assigned to study in the printmaking department, and at this stage he created a series of woodcut prints that recalled the life in the countryside, called "Broken Jade Collection". After these woodcut sketches, after visiting the "North Korean Art Exhibition" held by the National Art Museum of China, Xu Bing encountered a question, how can I get out of this art and make new art?
A silkscreen print by Andy Warhol in a repetitive form seen in World Fine Arts inspired Xu Bing to think about printmaking: the "plural" nature of printmaking is also a feature of modern society, and the treatment of materials in printmaking contains a unique affinity with contemporary art. In response to "plurality", Xu Bing began the experiment of "Five Plural Series", using the same board, carving and brushing, turning the creative behavior into a work, from the picture to the appearance to the hidden, creating a long volume of abstract meaning, the core of this work is not the final image presented, but everything experienced in the creation process.
This experiment prepared the creation of the Book of Heaven. Why did you choose Kanji? Xu Bing himself once mentioned that when he was growing up, he experienced the chinese character simplification movement after the founding of New China, some traditional characters were abolished, and some were restored to use, which made him feel that the artificially determined script was not only the foundation of a social culture, but also a tool for unifying thought.
Since 1986, the idea of "making a book that no one can read" has appeared in his mind, from the knowledge research on editions and line-bound books, to determining the font, preparing tools, blocking words, and then creating words, every step xu Bing strives to get closer to the classics, and each process requires precision and strictness and meticulousness. "Fake drama has reached an incredible level, and the strength of art will appear."
Xu Bing used as a "classic book" whose content was hollowed out to respond to thoughts and questions about "new art". When we read "The Book of Heaven", we first guessed that this was a serious "joke", but the real work of art lies in the creative process contained in time. According to the sequence of strokes from few to many strokes in the Kangxi Dictionary, Xu Bing made up more than 4,000 words in parallel, transferred the manuscript to a wooden block, wrote and carved himself, as if practicing, and began the engraving project every day in his hut. He said: "The core proposition of life is 'spending', that is, the ability to use up time. "It's reminiscent of what Duchamp, the father of postmodern art, said, his work is the time he spent.
From the Five Plural Series to the Book of Heaven, the artist cleverly finds a ready-made object in his own way: language and writing.
In the 90s of last century, he moved to the United States, starting from the language and writing, Xu Bing created "A, B, C...", "Transfer", "Post-Testament Encyclopedia", etc., to respond to the problems he had when facing another language, almost using a pragmatic method, grafting English with a Chinese method, all the way to "English Square Characters", using Chinese calligraphy to write English, reconstructing the structure of English fonts, Xu Bing has taken a closed loop at this time, with the same dismantling and reorganization method, from Chinese to English, and then back to Chinese.
The story of the "symbol"
Language and writing are sometimes meaningless or even uninterpretable in the Book of Heaven and in a series of subsequent written works. Since 2003, Xu Bing's slowly developed "Book of The Earth" is the opposite, returning to the recognition and ideographic functions of images.
The idea of "making a book with an identifier number that everyone can read" originated from Xu Bing's observation around the turn of the millennium, that in public places such as airports, which bring people from different countries together, public signs are the only universal language that people can understand without obstacles. So why can't you make a book or even a world in such language?
"The Book of Heaven" reflects the artist's "always a sense of awe that knowledge cannot enter and cannot come out", and "Book of the Earth" is an attempt to create a standardized world through symbolic language, from collecting symbolic signs to creating a book that tells stories with public symbols.
Of course, the standardized symbols used in the world cannot replace the real written language, which is to some extent a clever reference to the process of globalization and digitization, and it has become subtle in today's epidemic background. Because these symbols are designed and widely used, it is based on the social background that information needs to be quickly identified, and people need to establish a symbol that is quickly identified, which is the product of the emergence of a certain civilization, behind which is a unified social norm.
From "The Book of the Earth" to "The Story Behind the Scenes", the works are completely different, but in terms of creative concepts, some wonderful similarities can also be found. "The Story Behind the Scenes" uses dried plants, newspapers, plastic bags and other wastes, behind the rice paper glass, by adjusting the situation of light in the space, to present the effect of Chinese landscape painting. This state of perfect simulation is precisely because of the accurate grasp of a certain symbolism of Chinese painting, which does not use pen and ink, but has a very similar charm of various colors, which is recognized after people invoke the cognitive structure of landscape painting, and this understanding also requires the pre-establishment of a model.
Later, in the creation of "Mustard Garden Landscape Scroll", the artist reorganized the landscape hand scroll with a typical pictorial paradigm, deepening the artist's understanding of the symbolic characteristics of Chinese art. "Character Sketching" and "The Character of Chinese Characters" borrow the characteristics of Chinese characters as pictographic symbols, continue to use symbols to create, and use simulations to question stylization. When we look at these works, in addition to lamenting the subtlety of the artistic techniques and the beauty of the works, the more interesting question is, who determined these cultural programs? Are the effectiveness of these symbols reliable?
The images were dismantled into symbols and made into a Dragonfly Eye film, based on surveillance videos, which the artist used to edit and parody a story of "life change and love searching." As a stylized narrative, the film has a strange merger with the camera screen of the surveillance video, the narration and the picture are not tightly sewn together, and the interesting part of this work is the back story from the raw materials, and the truth of the lens makes the whole story more absurd.
Starting with a literal symbol and ending with a visual symbol, this is again a closed loop of the artist.
The Zen meaning of "appropriation"
Xu Bing said in the preface to the exhibition: "What the artist has done in his life is actually building a 'closed loop' of art that belongs only to himself... With the passage of time, this 'closed loop' will always reveal gaps, and more effective materials need to be found to make up for it. In this way, artistic creation is a continuous growth thing. ”
This gap can be seen in a flash of inspiration, where the symbol is dissolved and the closed loop is broken. For example, Xu Bing's 2004 "Where to Stir Up Dust". After the 9/11 incident in the United States, the entire lower manhattan was covered with gray-white dust, and Xu Bing collected a bag of dust, corresponding to Huineng's words, and created this installation. The clever meaning of this is to take people away from the closed loop of cause and effect, reminiscent of Duchamp's idea that "good things are better than nothing".
A feeling of inspiration also appeared in the project of "Tobacco Project", not in the "Tobacco Project - Glory and Wealth" "Tiger Skin Carpet" composed of 660,000 cigarettes, but in the work "Matchflower". From a distance it is a dead branch, and up close it is also a dead branch, but each branch becomes a matchhead. Regarding the "Tobacco Project", the rich content and background make the project carry sociological attributes, but Xu Bing has a sentence about this project that is very interesting and can become the subject of understanding, he said: "The physiological harm of smoke to people and what people get from the smoke, between gain and loss, is actually difficult to make a judgment." ”
The climax of the whole exhibition, when the first sight of the last work, the large-scale installation "Phoenix", appears, and the vision and psychology suddenly have a sense of openness and freedom. This work has long been heard and photographed, but when we are on the scene, the sense of presence is still absolutely overwhelming. These two "phoenixes" are made of real building materials, construction waste, labor tools, workers' daily necessities, wandering under it, you can see which piece is an excavator, which piece is a roller shutter door, where is a hard hat, etc., shocking people not only the huge posture, but also the traces of this industrial construction, the abandoned material scarred, relocated by a romantic imagination.
Originally commissioned, the work was to be placed in the public space of the Beijing CBD building, but it could not be put into the building due to many entanglements, so it became a work of art exhibited worldwide. Xu Bing proposed, "Because every piece of material of the 'Phoenix' has been touched by the hands of the laborer, they have their own divinity, and the 'Phoenix' is scarred but comes with its own dignity." This contemporary work draws on the techniques of folk art, using the lowest materials to express the hope for a better life in the future. ”
The emergence of the gap may come from the continuous attention and questioning of social issues, which makes Xu Bing constantly find ways to express himself in his own artistic language, and across different fields, to maintain sensitivity to the latest technology, which is also a constantly updated attitude of curiosity. Many people mention this characteristic of the artist, and will say that this is the humility and introspection of people who grow up in the background of a special era, and humility and introspection, no matter what era, is the highest personality charm of an artist.