The art of Xu Bing (b. 1955) nurtures a fundamental contradiction: the artist’s critical thinking on the state of the world in which he finds himself versus the diverse, meticulous methods by which that thinking is expressed. His work is neither strictly conceptual, turning on single ideas, nor rigidly retinal, seeking formal perfection. Xu Bing is something else: an artist whose work gives shape to ideas, and whose ideas are shaped by the changing world he inhabits. As he has said, “Wherever there are people, there are questions. And wherever there are questions, there is art.”
Forged into a visual worker during his intellectual and political upbringing in Beijing and the surrounding countryside, Xu Bing strove to find artistic truth, entering the Central Academy of Fine Arts in 1977. He achieved this first as a brilliant technician and aesthetician of his chosen medium of printmaking, then as a maverick amidst a daring avant-garde movement in 1980s China, and finally as a key figure, witty and trenchant, in an emerging discourse of global contemporary art in 1990s New York. Returning to China and to his alma mater in 2007, after more than fifteen years abroad, he committed himself to the renewal of the system and the institutions that shaped his own outlook.
This exhibition brings together more than sixty works from all phases of Xu Bing’s career, the most comprehensive exploration of his thinking and making ever presented in the city he has called home for most of his life. It seeks less to trace his development from project to project, era to era, than to raise a few fundamental questions about his unique contribution. How does this work balance the need for meticulous expression with the underlying suspicion that things may not be quite as they seem? How does this artist commit to producing in complex and myriad forms, while never forgetting that the systems we construct for ourselves are arbitrary? And what might these efforts have to say to us, here and now?
Philip Tinari and Feng Boyi
