Virtual China: Visual Arts: Interview with Xu Bing

The Visual Arts

Xu Bing: 'Twixt East and West
When the Chinese performance artist and calligrapher Xu Bing received the MacArthur "Genius" Award last June, the first thing he did was call his Mom.

"I told her I was given a 'genius' prize, and I said 'It was you who gave birth to this genius.' She's always been very supportive of my work. She doesn't understand it, but she believes in me."

It's not hard to understand his mother's perplexity, as well as her pleasure, at her son's artistic success. Forty-four years old and a U.S. resident for the past ten years, Xu Bing's art plies the murky metaphysical waters that run between language, culture, identity and nationhood. He once spent three years of his life handcarving thousands of woodblocks to print what at first appear to be exquisite books and scrolls filled with Chinese "characters" - the daubs and slashes of the Chinese writing system. Upon close reading, though, his hundreds of thousands of characters turn out to be utterly meaningless, if exquisitely beautiful, forms.

Case Study of Transference: Beijing Performance Art

Case Study of Transference: Beijing Performance Art

In a famous performance piece put on in Beijing in 1994, Xu Bing stamped temporary tattoos of English words on a lively male pig, and Chinese characters on a female pig, and put them both in a pen - where they mated in short order. In 1999, he has exhibited critically-acclaimed works in this vein at major art galleries and museums including the New Museum in New York and others in Japan, Australia, Germany, Mexico, and in Canada.

A Turn of Fate

His most recent work is "New English Calligraphy," another exploration of scripts and texts, this time combining elements of the English and Chinese written languages into a single script. It's a system of calligraphy in which English or any other alphabet-based language can be written to resemble Chinese characters. The verisimilitude is so successful that English speakers often gaze at English poems written in this hand and simply assume they are examining an alien text. The dawning realization that the text is legible, familiar, and maybe even mundane can offer a potent antidote to the all-too-familiar Western habit of exoticising all things Oriental.

Xu Bing's favorite way to present the New English Calligraphy to an audience is in a gallery or museum classroom where visitors sit down with brush and ink and begin writing the English characters for themselves. Soon they are creating a script that only moments ago looked totally foreign and forbidding.

An Interview with Xu Bing
Xu Bing VC: You are very proud of the New English Calligraphy. Why is teaching it in workshops to people around the world so important to you?
XB: If I hadn't had a chance to live in a society different from my own, from China, I would never have come up with this idea. It's like the crystallization of my many years of living in a different cultural environment. I like it because it has a lot of potential and possibilities. Because this work, you know, it's not just an art piece. It has a very social element to it.
VC: When English-speakers write in the "New English Calligraphy," do you think they feel a little of what you have felt, living between two cultures?
XB: It works a bit like a computer virus on people's brains. It creates breakdowns in people's normal thinking processes and in that way it's extremely useful.

interview continues
A turn of fate helped forge Xu Bing's intense relationship with the written Chinese language. Because his parents were both academics at Beijing University, he grew up in the 1960's on the university campus - a focal point of the Cultural Revolution raging at that time. Virtually every day the young Xu Bing was witness to the intense political debates, sloganeering, cruel "struggle sessions," and sometimes the outright violence of the Red Guards, the self-appointed young guardians of Communist ideology.

Brush to Paper

He spent a good deal of that decade in classrooms writing out tiny Chinese characters for grass roots newspapers and slogan-filled posters, penned with such painstaking precision they looked printed rather than handwritten.

Through calligraphy, Xu Bing says, he managed to make himself useful and stay out of trouble during those dangerous times. The image of a near-sighted bookworm putting brush ever so carefully to paper while all around chaos reigns is not far from how Xu Bing still appears today.

Only this time the tempest surrounding him is not do-or-die political fervor but the distractions created by his own artistic success. Accolades, awards, and requests for installations and interviews shower upon him, but Xu Bing simply continues to pen his calligraphy and prepare for the next show.