The China Project

50 opposite At home on the farm 1979 Woodblock print / Image courtesy: Claire Roberts Bustling village on the water 1980 Woodblock print / Image courtesy: Xu Bing Studio above Liu Wenxue (copy) 1970 Charcoal / 19.4 x 13.7cm / Collection: The artist / Image courtesy: Xu Bing Studio and calligraphy’. In 2007, he received the American Southern Graphics Council Lifetime Achievement Award. The same award had been given to American artist Chuck Close in 2004. Xu Bing’s reputation as a leading international artist is built on his masterpiece A book from the sky 1987–91, which was first exhibited at the National Art Museum of China in Beijing in a two-person show (with fellow CAFA teacher Lü Shengzhong) in 1988. 2 The work was conceived as an installation and attracted widespread acclaim and debate. It is based on a language of fake Chinese characters created by Xu Bing, painstakingly carved onto woodblocks as moveable type in the Song style typeface ( Song ti ) — the historically preferred typeface for official documents — and then printed on paper to form individual, classical-style books, wall panels and long lengths suspended from the ceiling. The following year, A book from the sky was included in the influential ‘China/Avant-Garde’ exhibition held at the National Art Museum of China after 4 June 1989, it provoked considerable controversy. Since then, it has been the centrepiece of many exhibitions around the world, including ‘New Art from China: Post Mao Product’, exhibited at the Art Gallery of New South Wales in 1992; and at the Queensland Art Gallery the following year. 3 Considered within a Chinese cultural context, A book from the sky is a challenging and even shocking work because it is impenetrable, like a wall blocking communication, or a secret text for which there is no Rosetta stone. The 4000 handcarved constituent words look like Chinese characters but cannot be read, causing frustration and confusion in Chinese viewers. The cultural resonance of the work is diminished in a Western context, because most people cannot read Chinese. But the knowledge that the Chinese-looking text is also unintelligible to Chinese readers immediately transforms viewers’ understanding of the work and enables it to be appreciated as sophisticated conceptual art. A book from the sky is a spectacular and confounding installation, adopting the guise of classical form to question the power of language that lies at the heart of Chinese culture. It is one of two contemporary Chinese art works illustrated in the influential art history reference book Gardner’s Art Through the Ages (2001 edition), paired with Rent Collection Courtyard 1965, a large, collective work comprising 114 figures made by sculptors from the Sichuan Fine Arts Institute at the beginning of the Cultural Revolution. It is arguably the definitive work of Chinese art from the second half of the twentieth century. Xu Bing comes from a family of intellectuals. His parents worked at the prestigious Peking University where his father was chair of the history department and his mother worked in the Department of Library Science. He went to school within the university precinct and was taught by distinguished faculty staff members who had fallen out of favour during the political campaigns of the late 1950s. It was a privileged and rarefied environment — books, ideas and scholarship occupied a central place in family life. During the Cultural Revolution, Xu Bing’s father was denounced and put in solitary confinement and his mother was sent off for ‘re-education’. He grew up questioning whether his beloved father could really be such a bad person. One of the big-character posters that stuck in Xu Bing’s mind was: ‘If the father is a hero, the son will be brave and true; if the father is a counter- revolutionary, the son will be nothing but a blackguard’. 4 Xu Bing felt burdened by the propaganda and was affected by peer pressure arising from his family situation. ‘For me,’ he said, ‘painting became the way in which I could show people that I was worthy of being part of this new movement and that I was actively trying to “reform” myself.’ 5 Drawings by Xu Bing from the early 1970s confirm this admission and include portraits of the child–hero Liu Wenxue and the model People’s Liberation Army soldier Lei Feng. Other works include a view of Weiming Lake at Peking University, once part of the Qing dynasty imperial garden, depicted with a burning smoke stack in the distance. There is also a pencil drawing of an army water bottle and rucksack dated 8 August 1971, a date that marks the fifth anniversary of the adoption by the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the ‘Decision Concerning the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution’. 6 This ‘Decision’ defined the Cultural Revolution as ‘a great revolution that touches people to their very souls’ and one that would ‘criticise and repudiate the reactionary bourgeois academic “authorities” and the ideology of the bourgeoisie and all other exploiting classes and to transform education, literature and art, and all other parts of the superstructure not in correspondence to the socialist economic base’. 7 Xu Bing’s modest, revolutionary still life perhaps suggests a desire to be a part of the movement that sent educated urban youths to the countryside to learn from peasants by living and working in their midst. In 1974, Xu Bing was sent to a commune in Huapen, a small and remote village in mountainous terrain in Hebei Province beyond the Great Wall, 95 kilometres north of Beijing. As a ‘rusticated youth’, he was to live and work in the farming community. The people of Huapen were poor, and Xu Bing and the five other students from Peking University were expected to assist with the physically demanding farm work. For Xu Bing, it was a relief to be removed from the trauma of his family situation and become immersed in rural life. ‘The countryside’, he said, ‘brought me