Xu Bing in Conversation

Xu Bing b. 1955, China Follow +

Xu Bing is a Chinese‑born artist who spent more than a decade in the United States before returning to Beijing, where he now serves as president of the Central Academy of Fine Arts. He is best known for printmaking and large‑scale installations that use text as both material and metaphor, probing how language and its visual presentation shape our understanding of the world.

In his landmark installation Book from the Sky (c. 1987–1991), Xu invented some 4,000 pseudo‑Chinese characters, hand‑carved them into woodblocks, and used them as movable type to print books and scrolls that are laid out on the floor and suspended from the ceiling. First exhibited in Beijing in 1988 as part of the pioneering exhibition China/Avant‑Garde, the work’s immersive sea of text has the weight and authority of classical scholarship yet remains entirely unreadable, exposing how easily form can masquerade as meaning.

Since then, he has worked with unexpected materials—including tobacco leaves, debris, and silkworms—to explore the transformative power of matter while continuing to question how societies construct value, knowledge, memory, culture, and history. Asia Society Hong Kong Center is currently presenting his first major solo exhibition in the city, It Begins with Metamorphosis: Xu Bing (on view from 8 May to 31 August 2014), curated by Yeewan Koon, which brings together landmark works and recent pieces to trace these evolving concerns. In the following conversation, Xu Bing, Koon and Anna Dickie discuss Andy Warhol, the universality of symbols, and how shifting contexts keep his work in motion.

“My interest in expressing contemporary life has remained the same. What has changed, and this is relevant to why my work has changed, is community, society, and culture.”

AD: You have mentioned before that Andy Warhol was someone who, at the very beginning of your career, influenced you. What was it about his work that resonated with you?

Andy Warhol 1928-1987, United States Follow +

XB: I first encountered Andy Warhol through images in a magazine showing three silk screen-prints, each depicting the same portrait image of Mrs Jackie Kennedy. What intrigued me was the use of repetition in printmaking. I was interested in why Andy Warhol would create three identical prints.

AD: And how did that translate into your work from there?

XB: I don’t think I would say he directly influenced my work, but I was struck by the repetition, and I then wrote a paper on the study of repetition. Seeing his work influenced me to explore the subject of repetition, and to intellectualise it.

I was interested in Andy Warhol’s investigation into the relationship between fine art and contemporary culture. One of the key characteristics of contemporary culture is the use of duplicates. We use the same icons and symbols across cultures—every plug symbol looks the same, for example—and it made me aware of the universality of such things. So from his work, I saw an extension from the concept of repetition to this concept of universality.

AD: If we draw a bridge between the early days, and the art you produce today—what do you think has been the biggest change in the way you make and think about the art you produce?

XB: As an artist, I still feel I am the same. My interest in expressing contemporary life has remained the same. What has changed, and this is relevant to why my work has changed, is community, society, and culture. My art is always speaking to contemporary life, so my art has changed as contemporary life has changed. An artist is always adapting what he wants to express as the world around him changes.

AD: Many of the works in this exhibition are new editions of earlier works. However, expanding on your previous answer, do you view these works nevertheless in many ways unique because of the different context in which they were made, and are presented?

XB: Yes, I do. The changes in our culture have changed the work. When a work is made it relates to a specific emotion at a specific point-in-time, so from my perspective it changes each time it is made. From an audience perspective, it also changes—because the audience’s context has also changed over time.

AD: So the work is different for every person who views a work?

XB: Yes.

“One of the key characteristics of contemporary culture is the use of duplicates. We use the same icons and symbols across cultures—every plug symbol looks the same, for example—and it made me aware of the universality of such things.”

[Yeewan Koon joins the conversation]

AD: Yeewan, when you look at this exhibition, what do you want the audience to take away from Xu Bing’s practice that they didn’t maybe know before?

YK: Good question. One of the things that everybody knows Xu Bing for is his interest in words and language, and also his interest in systems of knowledge; that is reflected in this exhibition and it is a crucial part of who he is. But I also think there are a lot of other things that people don’t know about him (or pay attention to as much)—well the story certainly hasn’t been told in Hong Kong—and it is a story about process and about making. Very much of what he does is about having a very intimate engagement with material and that was something I wanted to make sure people took away.

I also think he has changed as an artist in some ways, not in terms of who he is as a person, but the way his art has expressed different things. There is more humanity—a greater sense of human presence in some ways—so using things such as rubbish or things that people have handled. And I think that is a more intimate engagement that people are not so aware of.

AD: Did you think about the Hong Kong audience in curating this exhibition?

YK: We certainly thought about our audience. We wanted to have a variety of artworks that would engage people at different levels. Many people will know classical Chinese paintings, for example—so his work exploring that aspect will be interesting to them—we wanted to make the exhibition accessible to as many people as possible.

“The changes in our culture have changed the work. When a work is made it relates to a specific emotion at a specific point-in-time, so from my perspective it changes each time it is made. From an audience perspective, it also changes—because the audience’s context has also changed over time.”

AD: In the exhibition, Xu Bing’s studio or office is reproduced. I viewed it as a reminder about how much of his work has also been autobiographical. For example, Xu Bing uses tobacco in his work and this references his father’s lung cancer.

YK: Well, yes. Each of the rooms in the exhibition is designed to convey something about Xu Bing personally. So the first one with the silk worms is relevant to Xu Bing’s own description of his approach to work — he has described himself as being like a silkworm in the way he simply and diligently goes about working each day.

The next room includes the office, and is intended to act as a reminder of the actual process he undertakes to make the work.

The third room is relevant to print—showing a more recent work—but acts as a reminder of his artistic roots, which were in print.

AD: What next for Xu Bing?

XB: A lot of people think I am very creative, and the new works come easily. But I worry all the time about what I will create next. I just try to stay focused on the times and the changes in society, and I aim to form a new understanding of the world—and if I do this, then the ability to create a new art language is easier. —[O]