The China Project

53 Three Decades: The Contemporary Chinese Collection opposite Criticise Capitalism, Strive for Socialism, March into 1976 at a Combat Pace 1975 Mimeograph on paper / 27.4 x 19.6cm / Illustration from Brilliant Mountain Flowers (Lanman shanhua) / Collection: The artist / Image courtesy: Xu Bing Studio above Xu Bing at Huapen Commune, 1975–76 Photograph: Chen Fei Ya / Image courtesy: Xu Bing Studio in touch with nature and allowed me to understand what China was really about: the struggle to survive on the land.’ 8 A photograph of Xu Bing standing in the doorway of his home shows a smiling and relaxed young man wearing gumboots and carrying a hat, suggesting that he had just returned from work. A pair of couplets adorn the door frame. Xu Bing practised calligraphy from a young age, encouraged by his father. In Huapen, he became well known for his ability to wield the brush and was often called upon to write banners, posters and create propaganda arts. At the local county cultural centre in Yanqing he maintained the village blackboard, updating its slogans and news, and was involved in the production of the magazine Brilliant Mountain Flowers ( Lanman shanhua ). Among the surviving works from this period is a spirited mimeograph illustrating the slogan ‘Criticise Capitalism, Strive for Socialism, March into 1976 at a Combat Pace’. Three ardent young people armed with newspaper, hammer and picks march into the future under the banner ‘Learn from Dazhai’, a reference to Mao’s exhortation made in 1964: ‘In agriculture, learn from Dazhai’ promoted the revolutionary zeal of the citizens of Dazhai in Shanxi Province, who were said to have transformed agricultural production through hard work and a spirit of self-reliance. Xu Bing was accepted into a worker–peasant–soldier art group and his painting of students (from the secondary school which was attached to Peking University) setting off for Tibet was published in the Beijing Daily ( Beijing ribao ). When he was sent to the National Art Museum of China to work with professional artists in making modifications to paintings submitted for the national art exhibition, Xu Bing set his sights on attending CAFA. For the entrance exam, he submitted a folio including copies of the Brilliant Mountain Flowers magazine and painted a portrait of an educated youth in the countryside, reading from The Selected Works of Mao Zedong . It was titled True understanding ( Xinli ming ). 9 Xu Bing was one of 39 students admitted to CAFA in 1977. His ambition was to study oil painting in preference to Chinese brush-and-ink painting, which he described as ‘not international’, or printmaking, which he said ‘most people do not like’. 10 The printmaking department was hoping to train teachers to remain at the Academy and was given the first choice of students. With his superior drawing skills, Xu Bing was one of the most promising applicants, so it was decided that he would study printmaking. Despite his initial disappointment, he would come to understand this medium deeply and through it would discover extraordinary creative possibilities. During his three years in Huapen, Xu Bing made many drawings that reflected his daily life. Between 1977 and 1983, he created a series of small woodcuts drawing on those sketches and memories. The prints depict closely observed details of rural life — a family of pigs, courtyard houses, a meal of boiled bread ( mantou ) and steaming soup on a rustic table, covered baskets of grain, and a cat curled up asleep on a heated platform bed ( kang ). 11 The few figures in these modest, reflective works are small in scale and play a secondary role in the visual narrative. They are not heroic or larger than life, but ordinary folk whose livelihood is intimately connected to the land. And yet these are bold and beautifully composed works of art, pleasing exercises in the resolution of black and white or positive and negative, the principle that lies at the heart of printmaking. Their scale allowed Xu Bing to experiment with subject matter and technique and focus attention on detail in a way that suited his seriousness and diligent temperament. These prints can be conceived as individual works or parts of series, and echo the works of early twentieth-century Chinese master woodblock artists including Gu Yuan (1919–96), who was Xu Bing’s teacher. There is also an interest in abstracting imagery for artistic ends: the woodblock, as a compositional form, is not unlike the Chinese seal or chop, on which Chinese characters are carved. The large woodblock print Bustling village on the water ( Fanmang de shuixiang ) 1980 was created in the year of Xu Bing’s graduation. This ambitious and technically sophisticated work depicts a market day in one of China’s bustling southern canal towns and displays Xu Bing’s mastery of the woodblock medium, in particular his ability to create a graded monochrome effect to indicate shadow, demonstrated in his rendition of the canvas canopy in the foreground. It brings together many of the small vignettes drawn from daily life in individual works in the 1970s. And yet the constituent parts, which are of great interest in themselves, are called on to play a role in a large and complex composition that results from the resolution of abstract zones or shapes that are predominantly black and white. Xu Bing’s fascination with the potential of the woodblock medium and his diminishing interest in realistic representation for its own sake were further developed in the work submitted for his Master of Fine Arts degree, titled Five series of repetition 1987. Here, Xu Bing makes the process of carving, printing and seriality the subject of the work. He begins with a blank woodblock, which when printed reads as solid black, and ends with a totally carved block of wood which when printed is white. Xu Bing made prints of the changing surfaces of the woodblocks at various stages during