Xu Bing Landscape / Landscript: Nature as Language in the Art of Xu Bing
Xu Bing Landscape / Landscript: Nature as Language in the Art of Xu Bing
Shelagh Vainker and Xu Bing
Publisher: Ashmolean Museum
ISBN: 9781854442697
Pages: 200
Illustrations: 150 color works
8.75 x 11 in.
Paperback
Landscape, Landscript is a stunning book that underscores the genius of Xu Bing, contemporary Chinese artist and winner of the MacArthur “genius” award (1999). a Doctorate of Humane Letters from Columbia University (2011), the Fukouka Asian Culture Prize and the Wales International Visual Culture Award. This publication accompanied an Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, exhibition. The Ashmolean is one of the world’s centers for the study of Chinese art. Xu Bing used Chinese characters as landscape features in the composition of his paintings, revealing the pictorial qualities of the Chinese language which he maintains are at the core of its culture.
In this 200-page paperback with 150 color illustrations, the Chinese characters have the appearance of landscapes (Song dynasty (960–1279). Characters for ‘stone,’ for instance, make up an image of rocks; the character for ‘tree’ makes up trees; ‘grass’ for grass, and so on. The Landscripts are shown alongside his early landscape sketches and prints, with more recent pieces that depart from traditional styles. He also selected a number of European landscapes from the Ashmolean’s distinguished collections in an exploration of the interaction of different traditions, showing the influence, as well, of Western art on the Chinese.
Xu Bing lives in both worlds both East and West. He has been a U.S. resident for over 20 years, with home base a studio in Brooklyn. He returned to China after the Cultural Revolution. Today he is Vice President of the Central Academy of Fine Arts (CAFA), China’s foremost cultural institution, and he works around the world. He works in print, sculpture, installation, and performance. His innovations include a “living word” suspension that hung in the Gilbert Court space that was unveiled in the redesigned Morgan Library. At the Arthur M. Sackler Gallery, his “Monkeys Grasping for the Moon “ was a complex and specially-designed suspended sculpture. His works have been at Wisconsin’s Elvehjem Museum of Art (how Chazen Museum of Art), MASS MoCA, and at the San Francisco Museum of Contemporary Art. his Where does the dust collect itself? won the inaugural "Artes Mundi" prize in Wales for an installation using dust he collected in New York on the day after the destruction of the World Trade Center, and his spectacular Phoenix toured.
Born in Chongqing, southwest China, in 1955, the artist grew up in Beijing, where his parents were academics. His family was humiliated and tortured during the Cultural Revolution (1966–76) and he was sent to the countryside for ‘re-education’ after which he studied printmaking, becoming successful as both an artist and teacher. He left China for the United States in 1990.