Abstract
This article concerns nature and symbols and their appearance in Xu Bing’s innovative Background Stories series. I will demonstrate that although nature seems to be a thematic focus of Xu Bing’s recent practice, his attention shifts to pictorial signs and methods to engage the audience rather than exploring the concept of nature. Xu adopts tricks of disillusionment in his art to produce representations of landscape; for example, he places found objects on the verso of Background Stories (2004–) to produce the simulacrum of an ink painting on the recto (front surface).
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Similar content being viewed by others
Notes
- 1.
This is an indication of a wider problematic of artistic assimilation into and by the cultural “other,” which is beyond the scope of this essay. The title of this essay refers to Kulāp Sāipradit (Siburapha), Khanglang Phaap [Behind the Painting, 1937], trans. David Smyth (Singapore: Oxford University Press, 1990), which deploys the experiences of a young Thai student in Japan in the 1930s as a leitmotif for the awakening of a modern Asian artist overseas. It forms a distant pair with that other comedy of modern cross-cultural affiliations and conflicts set in 1930s China, Qian Zhongshu, Fortress Besieged, trans. Jeanne Kelly and Nathan K. Mao (New York: New Directions, [1947]; 1979).
- 2.
The Background Stories works are most clearly analyzed in Robert E. Harrist, Jr., “Background Stories: Xu Bing’s Art of Transformation,” in Xu Bing, ed. Reiko Tomii, et al. (London: Albion, 2011), 33–42. This book, unfortunately out of print, contains the best description of Xu’s total œuvre; it also contains the most comprehensive bibliography to that date by Kathleen M. Friello, together with a list of solo and group exhibitions to 2011. Harrist’s text is available online, last accessed November 22, 2016, https://www.britishmuseum.org/pdf/Background-Stories_Xu-Bings-Art-of-Transformation.pdf. Here, Harrist includes a clear description of Xu’s pictorial method for making these works. A video demonstrating the construction of a landscape for the British Museum, later shown at Bard College, is available online at http://www.west86th.bgc.bard.edu/notes-from-the-field/xu-bing.html (accessed November 22, 2016). The most comprehensive treatment of Background Story is found in the recent compendious and bilingual catalog Xu Bing, A Retrospective (Taipei: Taipei Fine Arts Museum, December, 2014), 328–41. I viewed Background Story: Immortals’ Seclusion in the Autumn Mountains at Beijing Third Plastic Factory 背後的故事:北京塑料三廠的秋山仙逸圖 on November 8, 2015 at the exhibition Three and One Thirds, which included works by Shang Yang, Liang Shaoji, and Xu, as the title suggests, at the former Third Plastics Factory, Su San Cultural and Creative Industry Park, Chaoyang District, Beijing. The work is a reenactment and interpretation after various segments of a Southern Song Dynasty landscape by Zhao Boju 趙伯駒 (1120–1182) in the Palace Museum, Beijing. I am indebted to the Xu Bing Studio for electronic copies of the group catalog, a detailed “Article and interview” with Yu Haiyuan in a 2015 unsourced publication entitled Chinese Ink Scroll 水墨卷. I am also indebted to the organizers for the work fact-sheet. Additionally, I am grateful to Xu for copies of Joseph Thompson et al., Xu Bing: Phoenix (North Adams, MA: Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art, 2013); the collection of his reprinted and edited writings, Xu Bing, My True Scripts 我的真文字 (Beijing: CITC Press, 2015); and for the pleasure of viewing his studio with him in October 2016. My early interview with Xu Bing on January 15, 1990 in Beijing before his move to the USA is available in Asia Art Archive. Asian Artist Transcriptions, Vol. II. Hong Kong: Asia Art Archive. Translations here are my own unless otherwise acknowledged.
- 3.
Harrist, “Background Stories,” 35.
- 4.
Ibid., 38.
- 5.
Harrist, “Background Stories,” 38.
- 6.
Xu Bing, “Background Stories,” My True Scripts, 215. The original article was written in 2006 and first published in 2014.
- 7.
As, for example, in his recent collection, Xu, My True Scripts, IX. It is not clear whether the Chinese title of this book is an intended elision of Chinese scripts 中文字‚ with the implication of the artist’s need to traduce the Chinese linguistic semiosis in order to make its use his own.
- 8.
Xu Bing states, “The[se arrangements] break our familiar patterns of thought and mix the connections between concepts. In the process of searching for a new method of understanding, the fundamentally lazy nature of thought is challenged. This forces you to find a new conceptual foundation.” See “An artist’s view,” in Persistence/Transformation, Text as Image in the Art of Xu, eds. Jerome Silbergeld and Dora C. Y. Ching (Princeton: P.Y. and Kinmay W. Tang Center for East Asian Art and Princeton University Press, 2006), 103; 105.
- 9.
Xu Bing, “To Mr. Jacques Derrida,” My True Scripts, 58–9.
- 10.
Ibid. Xu, 61. There is a full translation of Xu’s essay on his understanding of and relation with Derrida available online, last accessed November 22, 2016 http://www.xubing.com/index.php/site/texts; this site contains original texts and translations of many other essays about, and texts by, Xu.
- 11.
Harrist states, “The filter of the mind grants only limited access to the world, but it is through this imperfect screen, both opaque and translucent, receptive to some stimuli but oblivious to others, that art and reality are perceived.” See “Background Stories,” 42.
- 12.
“A Conversation with Xu Bing,” in Xu Bing: Phoenix, 124.
- 13.
John Rajchman in Xu Bing: Phoenix, 33, citing Shelagh Vainker et al., Landscape/Landscript. Nature as Language in the Art of Xu Bing (Oxford: Ashmolean Museum of Art and Archaeology, 2013), 125. Four categories of natural language: everyday language, signs and talismans, legible signs in the natural world, and embodied texts, are proposed by Richard Vinograd. See “Making natural languages and contemporary Chinese art,” in Xu Bing and Contemporary Chinese Art, eds. Hsingyuan Tsao and Roger Ames (Albany: SUNY Press, 2011), 95–115.
- 14.
More information can be found in an early classic Explaining Graphs and Analyzing Characters 說文解字, a second-century dictionary compiled by Xu Shen (58–148 C.E.). Xu, who is undoubtedly highly erudite in classical Chinese, is not always clear on the relationship between sound and graph in ancient Chinese or makes interpretations convenient to his further visual use of script forms.
- 15.
Xu continues his discussion of the liminal, “There is always a struggle over 50% or 51%; if as an artist you don’t grab that marginal 1%, you won’t master the symbol.” “A Conversation with Xu Bing,” in Xu Bing: Phoenix, 125.
- 16.
As material for possible future psychological hypotheses about what drives his work, one should note that Xu was also a breech baby, a birthing condition sometimes later associated with social alienation. See An Su, ed., Xu Bing Prints (Beijing: Wenhua Art Publishing, 2009), 252.
- 17.
Translated by Britta Erickson in chapter five, “Serve the People” of Erickson, Britta, Words without Meaning, Meaning without Words: The Art of Xu Bing (Washington: Arthur M. Sackler Gallery and Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2001), 74.
- 18.
Xu Bing, “This is Called ‘Going Deep into Life,’” My True Scripts, 57. The article was originally written in 2000.
- 19.
Yu Haiyuan, “Article and interview,” 7.
- 20.
Xu states, “What should our judgment to be based on? It should be based on an artist attitude and point of view, which transcends all institutions and values viewpoints. Relying on this [Chinese] system is problematic, relying on the West is similarly problematic.” Ibid., 4.
- 21.
Yu Haiyuan, “Article and interview,” 14.
- 22.
Ibid., 15.
- 23.
Yu Haiyuan, “Article and interview,” 12–13. The “diffuse perspective” may be described as scattered, multiple vanishing points.
- 24.
Zhu Xiao-Mei, The Secret Piano: From Mao’s Labor Camps to Bach’s Goldberg Variations, trans. Ellen Hinsey (Las Vegas: Amazon Crossing, 2007; 2012).
- 25.
Alice Yang states, “While it [A Book from the Sky] constructs a symbolic national text, it evacuates all meaning from such a text.” Why Asia?: Essays on Contemporary Asian and Asian American Art, eds. Jonathan Hay and Mimi Young (New York: New York University Press, 1998), 171. Cited in Stanley K. Abe, “No Questions, No Answers: China and A Book from the Sky,” boundary 2, v. 25, n. 3 (Autumn 1998): 169–192.
Bibliography
Xu, Bing. 2006. An Artist’s View. In Persistence/ Transformation, Text as Image in the Art of Xu, ed. Jerome Silbergeld and Dora C.Y. Ching, 99–111. Princeton: P.Y. and Kinmay W. Tang Center for East Asian Art and Princeton University Press.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2020 Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd.
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Clark, J. (2020). Behind the Painting: Xu Bing’s Hybrid Landscapes. In: Fraser, S., Li, YC. (eds) Xu Bing. Chinese Contemporary Art Series. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-3064-7_8
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-3064-7_8
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Singapore
Print ISBN: 978-981-15-3063-0
Online ISBN: 978-981-15-3064-7
eBook Packages: Literature, Cultural and Media StudiesLiterature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)