Abstract
This essay examines Xu Bing’s training and practice as a printmaker in the 1980s, highlighting the significance of his local beginnings. It traces his evolution from an art student excelling in making small woodcuts in a Chinese academic style to an artist exploring experimental printmaking. In this formative decade, Xu investigated the formal and conceptual properties of various print mediums, managing to straddle the blurred line between mainstream and avant-garde art spheres, and developed a nascent interest in language that would later deeply inform his art making.
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Notes
- 1.
I would like to thank Xu Bing for granting me the opportunity to interview him. I am grateful to his New York studio staff for allowing me to use his personal archives, and to his Beijing studio staff for providing additional access to his writings.
Several retrospective book and exhibition projects have offered a comprehensive survey of Xu’s career, including Reiko Tomii et al., Xu Bing (London: Albion Books, 2011); Xu Bing: A Retrospective 徐冰回顧展, Taipei Fine Arts Museum, Taipei, January 25 to April 20, 2014; Xu Bing: Thought and Method 徐冰: 思想與方法, Ullens Center for Contemporary Art, Beijing, July 21 to October 21, 2018.
- 2.
Tomii et al., Xu Bing, 87.
- 3.
Xu Bing, “Foreword: The Path of Repetition and the Imprint 自序:複數與印痕之路,” in Xu Bing Prints 徐冰版畫 (Beijing: Culture and Art Publishing House, 2010), 11; 20.
- 4.
A translation of Mao’s text is offered in Bonnie S. McDougall, Mao Zedong’s “Talks at the Yan’an Conference on Literature and Art”: A Translation of the 1943 Text with Commentary (Ann Arbor: Center for Chinese Studies; University of Michigan, 1980). For a discussion of the principles established by the Yan’an talks, see Julia F. Andrews, “Revolutionaries and Academics: Art of the Republican Period,” chap. in Painters and Politics in the People’s Republic of China, 1949–1979 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), 11–33.
- 5.
Xu Bing, “Understanding Gu Yuan 懂得古元,” in Xu Bing Prints 徐冰版畫, 241; 246.
- 6.
After participating in a Himalayan residency program organized by the Kiasma Museum of Contemporary Art, Finland, in 1999, Xu reminisced about his previous experience of “entering deeply into life” in China, and defined it as follows: “‘Entering deeply into life’ was peculiar to mainland China twenty to thirty years ago. Artists and art students would spend several months each year in the countryside, factories, or remote regions where ethnic minorities reside, to work and live with the local people, get to know them and become friends, in order to empathize with them. In the meantime, [we] would gather creative materials, and then return to the city to make art. This is called ‘enter deeply into life,’ which was a required course for artists, and was considered a prerequisite for the creation of good artwork loved by the masses.” Xu Bing, “This is Called ‘Enter Deeply into Life’ 這叫‘深入生活’ (April 28, 2000),” in My True Words 我的真文字 (Beijing: Citic Press Group, 2015), 52.
- 7.
Xu Bing, “A New Exploration and Reconsideration of Pictorial Multiplicity 對複數性繪畫的新探索與再認識,” Art 美術 (October 1987): 51.
- 8.
Ibid., 50, translation by author.
- 9.
Xu, “Foreword: The Path of Repetition and the Imprint,” 9; 16.
- 10.
Xu, “A New Exploration and Reconsideration of Pictorial Multiplicity,” 51, translation by author.
- 11.
Ibid., translation by author.
- 12.
Regarding twentieth-century Chinese artists and the question of popularization of sketching outdoors, see Yi Gu, “Scientizing Vision in China: Photography, Outdoor Sketching, and the Reinvention of Landscape Perception, 1912–1949” (Ph.D. diss., Brown University, 2009) and Christine I. Ho, “Drawing from Life: Mass Sketching and the Formation of Socialist Realist Guohua in the Early People’s Republic of China (1949–1965)” (PhD diss., Stanford University, 2014).
- 13.
Xu, “A New Exploration and Reconsideration of Pictorial Multiplicity,” 51, translation by author.
- 14.
Jane DeBevoise discusses the hybrid support system for Chinese art in the 1980s that relied on both state patronage and the marketplace; see, “Discourse and Debate about the Market and the State,” chap. in Between State and Market: Chinese Contemporary Art in the Post-Mao Era (Leiden: Brill, 2014), 127–47. Another study that examines the impact of the marketplace on state patronage is Richard C. Kraus, “The Waning Authority of the Chinese State as Patron of the Arts,” and “The Price of Beauty,” chaps. in The Party and the Arty in China: The New Politics of Culture (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2004), 37–72; 183–212.
- 15.
Wu Hung has observed the coexistence of five other art systems in relation to the contemporary art world since the 1970s, namely a highly politicized official art, an academic art, a “Chinese-style” pictorial art, a commercial art, and a popular urban visual culture. Borrowing political scientist X. L. Ding’s term, Wu describes governmental art institutions at the time as “amphibious,” because their own transformation produced heterogeneous voices and spaces within official circles. Wu Hung, Contemporary Chinese Art: A History (1970s–2000s) (New York: Thames & Hudson, 2014), 11; 433.
- 16.
Two important primary sources of the ’85 New Wave movement are Gao Minglu, ed., A History of Contemporary Chinese Art, 1985–1986 中國當代美術史, 1985–1986 (Shanghai: Shanghai People’s Publishing House, 1991) and Gao, ed., The’85 Movement: An Anthology of Historical Sources ’85 美術運動: 歷史資料匯編 (Guilin: Guangxi Normal University Press, 2008).
- 17.
For a detailed description of Lu Xun’s seminal role in the development of Chinese modern woodcut, see Xiaobing Tang, Origins of the Chinese Avant-Garde: The Modern Woodcut Movement (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008), 75–89; 103–10; and 141–210.
- 18.
Dr. Anne Farrer, Assistant Keeper at the British Museum, letter to Xu, January 13, 1988.
- 19.
“Young Women Threshing Rice 打稻子的姑娘們,” National Art Museum of China, last accessed April 10, 2019, http://www.namoc.org/zsjs/gczp/cpjxs/201304/t20130416_219177.htm.
- 20.
Xu Bing, “I Use This Method 我靠這個辦法,” Print Art 版畫藝術, no. 9 (May 1983): 16–17, translation by author.
- 21.
Ibid., 17.
- 22.
Xu disclosed the use of this technique during an interview with the author on June 30, 2016, Xu Bing Studio, Beijing.
- 23.
Yao Wu, interview with Xu Bing, Xu Bing Studio, Beijing, June 30, 2016.
- 24.
The notice letter, issued by China International Cultural Exchange Center on May 9, 1986, informed Xu of Still Life’s inclusion in the touring exhibition, together with two other prints. It further instructed him to make five to ten copies of each work for sales purposes on the tour and to sign and number the prints per international print fair standards.
- 25.
For an analysis of China’s evolving cultural ideology and the intellectual discourse of the tumultuous 1980s, see Jing Wang, “High Culture Fever: The Cultural Discussion in the Mid-1980s and the Politics of Methodologies,” chap. in High Culture Fever: Politics, Aesthetics, and Ideology in Deng’s China (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), 37–117.
- 26.
Seminal art newspapers and magazines that served as platforms for disseminating information about foreign art and promoting heated discussions about contemporary art in the 1980s include Fine Arts in China 中國美術報 published by Chinese National Academy of Arts, Beijing; The Trend of Art Thought 美術思潮 published by Hubei Artists Association, Wuhan; Jiangsu Pictorial 江蘇畫刊 published by Jiangsu Fine Art Publishing House, Nanjing; World Art 世界美術 published by CAFA, Beijing; Translations of Work on Art 美術譯叢 published by the Zhejiang Art Academy, Hangzhou. A good resource for the study of Chinese contemporary art from this early decade is Asian Art Archive, “Materials of the Future: Documenting Contemporary Chinese Art from 1980-1990 未來的材料: 紀錄 1980-1990 中國當代藝術,” last accessed April 10, 2019, http://www.china1980s.org/en/Default.aspx.
- 27.
Wu, interview with Xu Bing.
- 28.
Britta Erickson, Three Installations by Xu Bing (Madison: Elvehjem Museum of Art, University of Wisconsin-Madison, 1991), 15; Britta Erickson, The Art of Xu Bing: Words without Meaning, Meaning without Words (Washington, D.C.; Seattle: Arthur M. Sackler Gallery, Smithsonian Institution, in association with University of Washington Press, 2001), 38–39.
- 29.
The Hundred Surnames is a Chinese classical text in the form of a rhyming poem enumerating hundreds of family names. Compiled in the Song dynasty (960–1279), the list starts with Zhao, the surname of the Song imperial family.
- 30.
See Richard Vinograd, “Making Natural Languages in Contemporary Chinese Art,” in Hsingyuan Tsao and Roger T. Ames, ed., Xu Bing and Contemporary Chinese Art: Cultural and Philosophical Reflections (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2011), 96.
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WU, Y. (2020). From Small Woodcuts to Experimental Printmaking: Xu Bing in the 1980s. In: Fraser, S., Li, YC. (eds) Xu Bing. Chinese Contemporary Art Series. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-3064-7_7
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