Servant to the Script
By Anna Mantzaris

The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation has awarded grants to its 32 new fellows, including $315,000 over five years to Chinese American installation artist Xu Bing.

Born in Chongqing, China in 1955, Xu received his M.F.A. from Beijing’s Central Academy of Fine Art and now makes his home in New York City. The artist uses various techniques in his installation work, including calligraphy, printmaking, wordcarving and bookbinding.

“My work is always a book and calligraphy,” says Xu, who is best known for his controversial piece, A Book from the Sky, recently on exhibit as part of Inside Out at San Francisco’s Asian Art Museum.

Xu’s work is intricate with detail and often labor intensive. A Book from the Sky, for example, took four years to complete. “I carved each character on the wood for over one year, then found a small print house and worked with them,” Xu says. “Each page is hand-printed.”

Consisting of more than 4,000 characters made up of elements from Chinese characters, A Book from the Sky’s text is printed on sheets of paper, which hang from the ceiling. The script itself is illegible and nonsensical, and this is often a surprise to the viewer.

Some critics have speculated that A Book from the Sky is a tribute to Chinese culture, while others propose it is symbolic of the gap between Western and Eastern culture.

Xu says A Book from the Sky makes people break their patterns and ways of thinking, and opens up more space. “It makes them feel strange, ask questions,” he says. “It really bothers them, especially the intellectual, the scholar, professor, editor.”

Xu’s most recent work, New English Calligraphy, is a classroom installation that includes a running calligraphy instruction video. The participants think they are learning to write Chinese characters, but as the lesson progresses, they discover they are constructing symbols of English words. New English Calligraphy has traveled museums abroad, including Canada, South Africa, Taiwan, Korea and Japan.

Xu says that those who take part in New English Calligraphy have a transforming experience. “Western people see the characters as sacred and difficult to understand,” Xu says. “They think it’s Japanese or Chinese.”

But not all of Xu’s works are composed entirely of conventional materials -- he has also been known to incorporate live animals into his art. He says he likes to work with animals because they are not influenced by culture.

“I learn a lot from them,” Xu says. Working with animals “always lets me rethink the human being, the self.”

For his Tsan series, Xu used thousands of silkworms to alter pages of text as they spin their webs. In Opening, displayed at Bard College in Annadale-on-the-Hudson, New York, silkworms were placed on a mulberry tree, eventually consuming the leaves and forming cocoons as the exhibit came to a close.

Xu is currently working on various projects, and often travels to research spaces for future installations. He recently returned from a trip to Germany to help prepare for the End of the Millennium show to be held at the Bonn Museum. Xu’s piece, titled, Your Sir Name Please, is a computer program designed for participants to type in letters and words on an English keyboard. The computer program translates the letters into new characters and displays them on the screen.

Xu, who lives in the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn, feels that New York is convenient for artists, particularly because he often finds inspiration in New York’s streets as opposed to museums and galleries. But finding inspiration is only part of the challenge that he faces. For Xu, it is most important for artists “to learn how to concentrate on your mind, your work.”