The China Project

54 Five series of repetitions (detail) 1987 Woodblock print (showing one stage in the process of carving and printing) / Image courtesy: Xu Bing Studio the carving to explicate the process. The subject matter — close-up views of fields planted with vegetables and grains, and ponds full of tadpoles — recalls scenes from his youth in Huapen but is inconsequential. The work may be interpreted as a contemporary meditation on the metaphysical thinking of the ancient Daoist philosopher Laozi, whose writings, like those of Friedrich Nietzsche, attracted many young artists and philosophers in the period after the Cultural Revolution, when such writings had been taboo: ‘The myriad creatures in the world are born from Something, and Something from Nothing’. 12 Xu Bing was also interested in the idea that every print is a copy and that there is very little difference between an artist’s print and a machine-printed version intended for mass circulation. Printmaking is an ancient yet inherently contemporary medium because of its capacity for reproduction. It requires an artist to be highly skilled in technique and to think in abstract terms. The artist must be able to visualise the work back to front, as if reflected in a mirror, and conceive of it based on a sequence of independent stages of production. Unlike oil painting or brush-and-ink painting, woodblock printing is indirect, the inverse of other two-dimensional creative processes. It is by physically removing areas of the woodblock with a knife and then printing the work that an image comes into being. Technical and conceptual processes such as these laid the foundations for Xu Bing’s master work A book from the sky and have allowed him to work as a conceptual artist in a wide range of other media. This, together with the fact that printmaking as an art form comes with less expectations than brush-and-ink painting or oil painting, may also account for the large number of Academy-trained printmakers who have been able to move beyond their immediate discipline and achieve artistic success in the international arena — including Fang Lijun, Hong Hao, Feng Mengbo, Wang Zhiyuan, Qiu Zhijie and Shen Shaomin, to name a few. For the past five years, Xu Bing has been collecting digital icons that are widely used in contemporary society as a shorthand form of communication. Symbols such as + belong to an accepted visual language that urban people from all educational backgrounds and cultures recognise. Like the fake Chinese characters that make up A book from the sky , this language transcends culture, but in this case has no particular cultural guise. Xu Bing has called this unfolding work of international, computer-friendly symbols A book from the ground , creating a counterpoint to his handcrafted installation A book from the sky and extending his fascination with language, communication and repetition. In 2007, Xu Bing returned from New York to Beijing to take up the position of Vice President at the Central Academy of Fine Arts, the environment in which he had created A book from the sky 20 years earlier. The move back to China is part of his continuing artistic exploration. In a published interview Xu Bing reflected on the reasons for his return: It is just like when I went to America many years ago. Now I think that decision was right. At the time my heart and mind was lured ( zhao’an ) 13 there by Western contemporary art, so I shut the door and went. I was willing to be lured ( zhao’an ). But once I was embedded in life there I found that there were many problems and so I decided to leave. Now I have returned. This decision, like the one made over a decade ago, should also be right . . . Today the entire system of Western art, together with systems of commerce, Chinese unofficial