Xu Bing

Xu Bing
Xu Bing at the Asian Art Museum of San Francisco on January 28, 2011.
Born	Xu Bing 1955 (age 61–62) Chongqing, China
Residence	Beijing, China
Nationality	Chinese
Education	Printmaking
Known for	Installation art, Printmaking, Calligraphy
Notable work	A Book from the Sky
Awards	MacArthur Fellows Program

Xu Bing (Chinese: 徐冰 /ɕý pīŋ/, born 1955) is a Chinese-born artist who lived in the United States for eighteen years. Currently residing in Beijing, he used to serve as the vice-president of the Central Academy of Fine Arts. He is most known for his printmaking skills and installations pieces, as well as his creative artistic use of language, words, and text and how they have affected our understanding of the world.

Born in Beijing in 1955, Xu grew up in Beijing. His father was the head of the history department at Peking University. In 1975, near the end of the Cultural Revolution, he was relocated to the countryside for two years as part of Mao Zedong's "re-education" policy. Returning to Beijing in 1977, he enrolled at the Central Academy of Fine Arts(CAFA) where he joined the printmaking department and also worked during a short period of time as a teacher, receiving his Masters in Fine Art in 1987. After the Tiananmen Square Protests of 1989 his 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 where he was invited by the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He then resided to the United States until his appointment as vice-president of the Beijing CAFA in 2008.

In 1990-91, Xu had his first exhibition in the United States at the University of Wisconsin–Madison's Elvehjem Museum of Art (now Chazen Museum of Art) including his installations Book from the Sky and Ghosts Pounding the Wall. In Book from the Sky, the artist invented 4,000 characters and hand-carved them into wood blocks, then used them as movable type to print volumes and scrolls, which are displayed laid out on the floor and hung from the ceiling. The vast planes of text seem to convey ancient wisdom, but are in fact unintelligible. The Glassy Surface of a Lake, a site-specific installation for the Elvehjem, was on view in 2004-05. In this work, a net of cast aluminum letters forming a passage from Henry David Thoreau's Walden stretches across the museum's atrium and pours down into an illegible pile of letters on the floor below.