XU BING
PHOENIX
Fabrication of the Phoenix Project.
XU BING: PHOENIX One of the most important Chinese contemporary artists working today, Xu Bing has brought a phenomenal suite of works to MASS MoCA: a large new light box which mimics classical landscape painting, two monumental phoenixes made from construction debris sourced in Beijing, and a tiger pelt made out of cigarettes. An animation and a research archive of universal symbols illustrate his long-standing engagement with language. Each work contains a story about the past and present; taken together the installations highlight the central themes and working methods that characterize Xu Bing’s rigorous practice of the past two decades. The artist describes the show as one which speaks to his interest in transforming materials and meaning—rethinking, as he does, some of the most basic means of human exchange and social connection, from language to labor to capital, as well as their stand-ins and cast-offs. All of the works on view are part of a series or are part of longterm projects that are still unfolding: Xu Bing is known for mining a subject in depth over the course of many years. Process—the story behind the work of art, how a thing is actually made, and why, and by whom—is important to Xu Bing and to an understanding of his art. His installations are usually labor-intensive and are often collaborative. Requiring many hands, they can be much like the communal, agricultural work the artist was required to perform as part of his Maoist “re-education” during China’s Cultural Revolution. That history informs Xu Bing’s work on many levels, and is as important as his years studying printmaking at the prestigious Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing, or his eighteen-year residency in New York City. His experience living between two countries and two cultures—and even between two Chinas—shapes his outlook and production. The usual divisions between past and present, East and West, traditional and contemporary art, are transcended in Xu Bing’s practice which, at its core, finds new ways of understanding culture and history and the human relationships they reflect. 02
Background Story, 2012; natural debris attached to acrylic panel, light box; 25 x 12 x 7 ft. Installation view.
BACKGROUND STORY The introductory work in the exhibition makes clear Xu Bing’s complex connection to the past and to tradition. When visitors first enter the main gallery, they are met with a vision of a monumental, classical Chinese landscape painting. Measuring 25 feet high, the work is the most recent in Xu Bing’s series titled Background Story (2004–present). As viewers move closer to what appears to be a brightly lit, vertical hanging scroll painting, they see that the work is actually a light box with an image of a traditional ink landscape “drawn” beneath its surface, in light and shadow. Like many of the artist’s works, Background Story is not what it seems. Walking around to the back of the piece, we are able to see the method of the artist’s illusion; bits of debris harvested from MASS MoCA’s site, dried branches and leaves, and crumpled paper and trash are affixed to the back of a frosted glass panel. The silhouettes of the objects—painstakingly arranged by the artist but attached in a rather crude manner—create images of mountains, trees, and water, like those in the 1705 Qing Dynasty work on which it is based: Landscape Painted on the Double Ninth Festival from the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. Xu Bing’s light painting not only mimics these elements but also the character of painter Shitao’s brushstrokes and ink washes. Xu Bing sees these works as a dialogue with his predecessors, referencing the Chinese practice of learning landscape by copying the great masters. At the same time, the work demonstrates that the artist is able to achieve similar results—as well as a mastery of a prescribed vocabulary of traditional brush work—through entirely different means. With the simplest, lowliest of materials, he echoes one of the grandest Chinese traditions—a radical message for traditionalists, though Xu Bing is quick to embrace both old and new. Indeed, the first of this series was an attempt to recover a missing bit of history. While the artist was in residency at the American Academy in Berlin in 2004, he was invited to create an exhibition for the Museum of East Asian Art. Xu Bing had learned that many works from its collection were pilfered by the Red Army at the end of World War II, and he decided to make copies of three Chinese landscape paintings that had been stolen. His method was inspired by the illuminated museum cases where the works would have been displayed. The title of the works could refer to the anecdote from the museum’s history, of course, or it could also describe more literally the unexpected mode of its own production and what is visible at the back of the work. Background Story would, in fact, be an apt title for almost any of Xu Bing’s works, indeed his practice as a whole—which consistently reminds us to question what we see and investigate what we are told; i.e. to find a deeper reality, which is often messier than the seeming beauty of a story’s surface. 04
XU BING’S BACKGROUND STORY Xu Bing has his own background story. Born in Chongqing, China, in 1955, he was raised in Beijing. His father was Director of the Academic Committee of the History Department at Beida (University of Peking), and his mother worked in its library sciences department. During the Cultural Revolution, his father was labeled “capitalist roader” and jailed, while his mother was detained for re-education. Despite his family’s status, Xu Bing excelled at school because of his artistic talents and was allowed to advance to high school. There he used his printing, drawing, and calligraphy skills to make propaganda for the school. He learned well how text and image could be manipulated to alter perception and thus reality itself. Following high school, Xu Bing was sent to the countryside in Huapen, north of Beijing, for re-education. He worked alongside locals in the remote village, tending crops and animals, and continued to practice his artistic skills, using them in service of both the village and the Revolution. Following Mao’s death and the ousting of the Gang of Four, Xu Bing’s parents returned to their positions at the University, and between 1977 and 1981 Xu Bing was able to study at the Central Academy of Fine Arts (CAFA). After graduation he became an instructor there, teaching drawing. Over the next decade he became known as a talented printmaker, and was included in many exhibitions in China and abroad. In 1987 he completed his master’s degree, though by this time Xu Bing was already a primary member of what would be called the ’85 New Wave Movement, a group of artists who were changing the direction of Chinese contemporary art, influenced, in part, by western conceptual art and theory. In 1987, Xu Bing began Book from the Sky, the project that would bring him notoriety in China, and later in the United States. That room-size installation is composed of scrolls, books, and wall panels printed with what appear to be traditional Chinese characters but are in fact illegible pictograms wholly invented by the artist. He carved each of the thousands of type blocks over a period of many years, printing the absurd text in the most authentic manner possible. In 1990, in the wake of the events in Tiananmen Square, Xu Bing moved to the U.S. He was invited for a residency at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, and soon after enrolled as a graduate student at the University of South Dakota which allowed him to apply for a green card. In 1992, the artist moved to New York. That year and the next he was included in numerous exhibitions showcasing the new Chinese avant garde, and in 1994 was included in the 45th Venice Biennale. Over the ensuing decades, Xu Bing built the international practice he is known for today. In 2007, he returned to Beijing to accept the position of Vice President of CAFA, bringing his story full circle. The artist is now based between Beijing and New York and maintains active studios in both cities. 05
Phoenix Project (2007–2010); debris and materials from construction sites; approx. 26 x 95 ft. and 26 x 100 ft. Collection of Barry Lam. Installation view.
PHOENIX PROJECT On returning to Beijing after almost two decades in the United States, Xu Bing was struck by the immense changes wrought in China. The rapid redevelopment of urban centers—and the new skyline populated by soaring, luxury skyscrapers— were a striking indication of the country’s new wealth as well as the cultural and social changes that accompanied it. The Phoenix Project (2007–2010)—two spectacular and massive birds fabricated with construction and demolition debris from building sites in Beijing—was born from the artist’s experience of these new developments. Installed in MASS MoCA’s 300-foot long main gallery, the two great phoenixes—each nearly 100 feet long and weighing over 20 tons in all— were created over a period of two years. This narrative is told in the documentary film and collection of ephemera presented in the gallery located behind the main space, and in the series of illustrations arrayed along the reading ledge in the far corner of the big space (these images are taken from an artist book by Xu Bing, available in bound form in the museum’s retail store). Originally the works were commissioned by a real estate developer/collector, and were conceived for the glass atrium connecting the two towers of the Cesar Pelli-designed World Financial Tower. Visiting the site, Xu Bing was struck by the stark contrast between the luxury of the new building and the crude conditions in which the construction workers labored and lived. He began collecting and purchasing materials from what he saw as a landscape of waste to create the birds which, for the artist, would emphasize the intersection of these two versions of Chinese society—its grittier realities as well as its fast-emerging splendor. In his original sketches, the artist imagined two cranes—suspended in the glass space as if in a cage, or arrested in mid-flight. The crane was deemed “too inauspicious an image” by the commissioning collector, however. Xu Bing then settled on the phoenix and began researching this multifaceted symbol which has signified a multitude of meanings throughout history from imperial power and wealth, to prosperity, fertility, and eternity. The artist was particularly attracted to an image of the phoenix from the Han Dynasty, when the bird was often featured in male/female pairs like those now suspended from MASS MoCA’s beams. Steel rebar, girders, bamboo, scaffolding, conduit, shovels, hard hats, gloves, and other evidence of labor (and demolition) form the body, feathers, and talons of Xu Bing’s interpretation of these mythical birds. The heads of both the male Feng and the female Huang are made from the nose of industrial jackhammers, a contemporary translation of their strength and ferocity (historical images of the phoenix often show the powerful bird with a snake in its talons or beak.) As an image, Xu Bing’s birds are a potent comment on wealth and excess— and also on the progress of modern society and the debris often left in the wake 08
of progress. Their means of production, however, are even more revealing of the complex relationship between labor, capital, and culture that is at the heart of China’s great socioeconomic expansion. Tellingly, and quite consciously, Xu Bing fabricated the sculptures with a team of migrant workers much like those who build the skyscrapers transforming China’s cities. Xu Bing explained the origin of the piece in an interview for The New Yorker: I went to a construction site and I was shocked. China has so many modern buildings, but you can’t imagine how poor the working conditions and primitive living situations were. There is a huge contrast. That was when I decided to use waste materials. I wanted to use the waste materials from the building construction to create a piece of work that hangs inside the building itself. I thought that could have meaning. Because this building was very extravagant. As I saw it, using garbage and construction waste to make a piece of work would make the building look even more extravagant. They complement each other. The material would make the building look grander, and this grandeur would make the phoenixes look even rougher and more authentic.
That authenticity was also characteristic of its fabrication. Drawing attention to the circumstances of the laborers who built the work and the buildings that inspired it—as well as the unceremonious destruction of many old neighborhoods and hutongs to make room for new construction—the work proved controversial. The work’s scale, cost, and raw energy, together with its distinctly Chinese mode of creative production, caused the Phoenix Project to be labeled “an artwork almost too vivid in its resemblance to contemporary China.” Indeed, given what was beginning to be understood as the sculpture’s critical edge, the original commissioner abandoned the project. The presentation of the phoenixes at MASS MoCA is the sculptures’ first appearance outside China where the two huge birds briefly graced an outdoor space at the Today Art Museum in Beijing’s Central Business District and the Baosteel Stage at Expo 2010 in Shanghai. Here in North Adams, the mythical beasts are suspended from the museum ceiling in a room not unlike the industrial space where it was built. The crates which housed them on their journey to the U.S. sit in the gallery, reminding viewers of the home they left and their relationship to the global economy which had a role in their conception. By day, the birds are reminiscent of caged creatures, almost too large for their confines, their rough components strikingly, almost disturbingly, visible. At night L.E.D. lights embedded in the sculptures lend them the impression of a shimmering constellation. In these two incarnations, the birds’ mix of beauty and wildness is further distinguished and amplified. 09
Unlike the Western myth of the phoenix in which the miraculous bird arises reborn from the ashes, in Asia—in its earliest incarnations—the phoenix is not associated with destruction and rebirth. And yet Xu Bing’s work often plays with the plasticity of language and icons, finding fertile ground in translations and mistranslations within and across different languages and cultures. The phoenix thus offered the artist a particularly rich range of literary and visual expressions that he could draw upon to reconfigure an important—and continuously evolving— symbol. The most-respected creature of Chinese legend after the dragon, the phoenix is often paired with the male dragon and understood to be a feminine creature. Together the two symbolize a perfect marriage. (Xu Bing has often used animals and insects in his work—sometimes live—to reveal and interrogate human instincts and behaviors at a more clinical distance.) In this way his mythical phoenixes can perhaps be seen as stand-ins for the laborers who made them— disposable like the waste materials they used—yet ultimately the source of power and prosperity the creature historically symbolizes. Adapting the pair of phoenixes of the Han Dynasty, the artist is perhaps giving a nod to the marriage of labor and capital that is the yin and yang of today’s China.
TOBACCO PROJECT The artist’s inventive reuse of familiar images and icons is seen again in the work on the mezzanine gallery. The faux tiger-skin rug, 1st Class (2011) was made with approximately 500,000 cigarettes arranged so that the white papers and orange/tan filters create the look of the animal’s stripes. The tiger-skin rug is a recognizable symbol of colonialism and luxury in Asia. Xu Bing’s version also references the history of the global tobacco trade—both its role as a boon to many economies and its complex position in society and in our psyches—as a much-loved indulgence and a known threat to health. (Xu Bing’s father died of lung cancer.) This work was originally created for the exhibition Xu Bing: Tobacco Project (2011) at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, though the artist began the project in 1999 when invited to be artist-in-residence at the museum at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina. The Duke family made its fortune from tobacco, and Xu Bing became interested in the significance of the tobacco plant to the city and the region, as well as its connections to China. The Duke family had identified the large Asian population as a potential mega-market and had its headquarters in Shanghai in the early 1900s; today China produces and consumes one-third of the world’s tobacco. Smoking plays a significant role in daily life, given as gifts and used as a social lubricant, much as it did in the early Americas where it was employed as a form of currency, in social ritual, and even as a diplomatic tool (the peace pipe of lore). The title, 1st Class, ironically the name of a U.S. brand of discount cigarettes, hints at the socioeconomic disparities and power relationships associated with both cigarettes and the tobacco industry—especially when coupled with references to luxury, colonialism, and domination represented by the tiger skin. Harvesting and drying tobacco is backbreaking work, and in many places tobacco workers are forced to work under poor conditions and for little pay despite the wealth of the industry. Globally, tobacco workers are among the most disenfranchised and often represent a migrant population. The tobacco farms here in western Massachusetts, for example, often hire laborers from Puerto Rico and Jamaica, as the locals are not willing to do the difficult work. Xu Bing’s work—including its labor-intensive mode of installation—is an homage to the agricultural and industrial workers the artist respects and admires and also a reminder of their vulnerability.
opposite: 1st Class, 2011; 1st Class brand cigarettes, adhesive; approx. 40 x 15 ft. Installation view.
THE CHARACTER OF CHARACTERS The Character of Characters (2012/2013)—Xu Bing’s first animation, commissioned and generously lent by the Asian Art Museum, San Francisco, California—is a penetrating, often wry analysis of the Chinese through their calligraphy. As Xu Bing puts it, “My intention is to set forth my views on the origins of the Chinese people and their distinctive qualities—respect for tradition and ceremony, ability to bear hardship without complaint, firmness cloaked in gentleness, and ability to change with circumstance.” Animated from thousands of hand-drawn sketches, the video depicts the roots of Chinese writing in nature and its role in education, spirituality, government... even the way that calligraphy shapes Chinese traffic patterns. Xu Bing’s video begins with a single horizontal brushstroke—the number 1, taken from an ancient scroll, Sutra on the Lotus of the Sublime Dharma by Zhao Mengfu (1254–1322)—which slowly dissolves to reveal boundless worlds within one mark. Like Xu Bing’s Landscripts, the animation features landscapes drawn using characters for the depicted elements. A tree, for example, is drawn with strokes that form the character for “tree,” calling out the tight connection between calligraphy and painting. The repetition of landscape characters highlights a Chinese attitude towards copying; gaining technical skill by copying from masters is a revered tradition in China (which is emphasized again in images of children dutifully tracing). With drawings of the eye and brain, Xu Bing connects the practice to fundamental characteristics of Chinese thought. As the video unfolds, we learn more: the importance of brushes; the reverence for ritual illustrated by the transfiguration of inked characters into spirits; and the power of written language as both weapon and source of political authority, as brushstrokes morph into knives and march alongside tanks. In images of contemporary China, ink strokes become the skyscrapers and commercial logos that attract a newly wealthy middle class. In short, The Character of Characters illustrates the written word as the building blocks of a nation and its psyche. Several works from Xu Bing’s Square Word Calligraphy series are shown opposite the animation, including Four Poems by W.B. Yeats and Spring River Flowing Moonlight Poem by Zhang Ruo Xu (both 2008). Bridging East and West, these works are powerful examples of a new mode of writing developed by the artist. At first glance, the characters appear to be Chinese. On closer examination, they reveal themselves to be English words, but constructed in the graphic logic of Chinese calligraphy. To those for whom the characters at first seem familiar, the meaning is indecipherable. But to those for whom the characters at first seem foreign, there is an almost miraculous moment of legibility and comprehension. And for everyone, Xu Bing’s masterful calligraphic hand is evident. 12
BOOK FROM THE GROUND Book from the Ground (2003–present) continues Xu Bing’s long-standing investigation of language. The participatory installation recreates the artist’s studio space in the gallery and includes his growing collection of signs, icons, and pictographic symbols amassed over nearly a decade of research. Inspired by the universal images used in air travel, the artist began compiling a vocabulary of recognizable icons found on signage, consumer packaging, computers, and instructional manuals. Archiving and digitizing these symbols, Xu Bing has developed a software program that translates English and Chinese into this modern form of hieroglyphics. Seeing the utopian potential in these international signs—a pictorial language which breaks down linguistic barriers and can be understood by people across cultures and of varied educational backgrounds— the artist has written a 200-page novel using only these icons. From Point to Point records a day in the life of a young urbanite named “Mr. Black.” In its radical form and style, the book has been likened to a Ulysses of the global age. In the installation of Book from the Ground at MASS MoCA, visitors are urged to explore and use the graphic resources. Feel free to peruse the materials, use the software to develop your own stories, and add to the artist’s collection. (But please leave the materials behind for the next visitor!)
Book from the Ground, 2003–ongoing, detail; collage on graph paper; 7.8 x 32.8 in.
Xu Bing: Phoenix December 22, 2012–October 27, 2013 Photos by Ross Mantle, Xu Bing, Zhao Gang Phoenix Project was commissioned by Ravenel Art Group, and is on loan courtesy of the collection of Mr. Barry Lam. Major support provided by the artist’s studio; Eslite Gallery; Beautiful Asset (Beijing) Industry Co., Ltd.; E. Rhodes and Leona B. Carpenter Foundation; Horace W. Goldsmith Foundation; Massachusetts Cultural Council; Robert Lehman Foundation; Helen & Will Little; Rene Balcer & Carolyn Hsu-Balcer; Hugh Freund; Cynthia Hazen Polsky & Leon Polsky; Alex G. Cao & Tina Wong; Jim Schwarz; Sheffield Plastics, and an anonymous donor.
cover: Phoenix Project (2007–2010), detail
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