Background Stories: Xu Bing’s Art of Transformation Robert E. Harrist, Jr.

Over twenty years have passed since Xu Bing began work on a set of beautifully crafted volumesprinted from pieces of wooden type he designed and carved. When first exhibited in Beijing in1988, these volumes, known collectively as Book from the Sky, appeared to consist of thousands ofpages of perfectly legible texts (figs X, XI, XIV, XXX).1 But when readers, or rather, would-be readers, took a closer look, everything changed. Instead of real characters, Book from the Sky wasseen to contain nothing but meaningless graphs invented by Xu Bing. As this transformation ofapparent meaning into revealed nonsense took place, there began a dialogue between Xu Bingand the viewers of his work, a dialogue that continues to this day, in which he shows us onething and then compels us to discover something very different.

Book from the Sky holds out the promise of legibility and then defeats all attempts to find hiddensemantic content. Various works that feature Xu Bing’s square word calligraphy, do just the opposite. In this form of writing, graphs assembled from the basic strokes of brush-written calligraphy appear to be Chinese characters; with a bit of practice, however, they can be read aswhat they really are: Roman letters spelling the words of nursery rhymes, sayings from ChairmanMao, or exhibition titles (fig. XXXI). Bird Language, from 2003, consists of a set of metal birdcages; but the skeins of wire that form the sides of the cages are something more: transcriptions ofquestions that Xu Bing has been asked about his art and his corresponding answers (fig. XXIX).

In other works, Xu Bing turns language into pictures and pictures into language. His drawingsproduced between 1999 and 2004, titled collectively Landscript, represent spacious vistas renderedin firm ink strokes on paper; but the landscape elements are actually Chinese characters arrangedso that the character shi 石 or ‘stone’, for example, repeated in various sizes, indicates cliffs orembankments, while clusters of the character cao 草, which means ‘grass’, represent verdantfields (figs XXI, XXXII). Immediately familiar pictorial forms that gradually reveal unexpected semantic content appear in one of Xu Bing’s most recent projects, Book from the Ground. For thisongoing experimental work, shown in installations that have included wall texts and computerscreens, Xu Bing collected pre-existing logos that constitute a banal lingua franca of internationaltravel and advertising, displayed in airports and other public spaces.2 In his hands, these familiarsigns have turned into units of a new script, legible to speakers of any language, that Xu Binghas used to write the opening of a novel about a man experiencing the frustrations of travel in a tense urban environment (fig. XXXIII).

Like a quietly efficient demolition expert, Xu Bing reduces to rubble the normal logic throughwhich words, pictures, and everyday objects are perceived and understood.3 He gives us in returnbrilliant hybrids: printed graphs that resemble Chinese but are not; elegant Chinese brush-strokes that spell English words; landscapes made out of writing. In these works, Xu Bingstages recurring dramas of transformation, insisting that we witness one thing turning intosomething else. But he also makes sure that the transformations are never complete. Forms andmeanings oscillate and change, flipping back and forth between one state and another, writingand nonsense, Chinese and English, pictures and words.

32

1

Book from the Sky, originally titled A Book

from the Sky: The Mirror of the World – An

Analyzed Reflection of the End of this Century,

has been shown in various configurations

throughout the world. The best intro-

ductions to Book from the Sky and to the

art of Xu Bing more generally are the

studies by Britta Erickson, ‘Process and

meaning in the art of Xu Bing’, in Three

Installations by Xu Bing, Madison, Wisconsin,

Elvehjem Museum of Art, 1991; and The Art

of Xu Bing: Words without Meaning, Meaning

without Words, Washington, D.C.: Arthur

M. Sackler Gallery, Smithsonian Institu-

tion/Seattle, University of Washington

Press, 2001. Xu Bing’s webpage, http://www.

xubing.com, is the most complete online

record of his career. For this essay, I have

relied especially on Museum für Ostaisi-

atische Kunst, Xu Bing in Berlin: ‘Sprachräume’

(Berlin: Museum für Ostasiatische Kunst,

2004). Unless otherwise indicated,

statements or information attributed to

Xu Bing are from interviews conducted at

his studio in Brooklyn, New York, on

14 September and 13 November 2007 .

2

Xu Bing, ‘Regarding Book from the Ground’,

trans. Jesse Robert Coffino, Yishu: Journal of

Contemporary Art, June 2007, pp. 70–5.

3

Critics and art historians have likened Xu

Bing’s artistic practice to a form of decon-

struction, parallelling that of philosopher

Jacques Derrida. See Ann Wilson Lloyd,

‘Vanishing ink’, in Xu Bing in Berlin, p. 25.

XXIXXu Bing, Bird Language 鸟语, 2003,4 sound-activated toy birds, 4 brassand copper birdcages composed of English and square word calligraphy,gravel; cages: 30.5� 26.5� 26.5 cm;24� 26� 26 cm; 31.5� 23� 23cm; 27� 23� 23 cm. Installationview from ‘Xu Bing’, Chinese ArtsCentre, Manchester, 2003–4

XVIIIXu Bing, Background Story 4 (front view) 背后的故事4, 2004, various materials and natural debris attached to frosted acrylic panels, acrylicpanels: 200 � 1600 cm overall. Realized for ‘The 3rd Chinese Media Art Festival’, China Academy of Art, Hangzhou, China, 2008.(Based on Dwelling in the Fuchun Mountains [1348–50] by Huang Gongwang [1269–1354].)

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In addition to obscuring boundaries between different languages and different forms of visualcommunication, Xu Bing’s protean inventions embody an essential insight into the nature ofart objects and how they come into being. Through the transforming intervention of the artist,a material substance becomes the vehicle of an immaterial concept transcending the immediatephysical presence of the object presented to the viewer. In describing this phenomenon, Xu Binghas cited a precept in Sunzi’s Art of War: ‘make a noise in the east, attack in the west’. The materialsubstance of the work of art – ‘the noise in the east’ — is like a strategic feint that facilitates ‘theattack in the west’ — the production in the viewer’s mind of a flash of insight or feeling that isthe artist’s ultimate goal. But these dual elements, material and immaterial, the ‘noise’ and the‘attack’, exist and are perceived at the same time, and this duality or simultaneity is also an essential property of a work of art.

In pictorial art, a state of simultaneity arises from the fact that pictures show the viewer both a virtual, fictive subject and a configuration of colour, tone, and lines created in ink, paint, orsome other medium. To be seen as a picture, a painting or drawing must be perceived as bothform-embodying image and as a marked surface: otherwise, there is no way to distinguish between looking at a picture of something and looking at the real thing. In the words of MichaelPodro, ‘the subject (of the picture) must … be seen and conceived as distinct from the medium inwhich it is represented, unless we suffer delusion.’4 The philosopher Jennifer Church explainsthe phenomenon in this way: ‘What seems to be an object — the painting — will also seem to bean appearance of some further object.’5 Virtual forms that seem to exist on, within, or behind a flat surface, pictorial images inhabit an ambiguous ontological zone, like the products of Xu Bing’s experiments in which strange graphs hover between different languages or a birdcagefunctions as a discourse on art.

In a recent series of installations, each titled Background Story (Biehou de gushi背後的故事), Xu Bingnot only explores the fundamental duality of pictorial art — as object and as depicted forms —but also complicates, and calls our attention to, the relationship between image and medium byonce again showing the viewer things that are not what they first appear.6 Xu Bing began thisseries in 2004 while a fellow at the American Academy in Berlin. While living in the city, he wasasked to prepare a solo exhibition at the Museum of East Asian Art (Museum für OstasiatischeKunst).7 The museum was founded in 1906, but at the end of the Second World War almostninety per cent of its collection of paintings and other objects was looted by the Red Army andtaken to the Soviet Union (figs XXXV, XXXVI).

Based on pre-war photographs of three of the paintings stolen from the museum, Xu Bing decided to make re-creations of them, using panels of frosted glass measuring 184 � 367 cm set in illuminated cases where the paintings rightfully should be displayed (fig. XXXIX). Visiblebehind the panes of glass are the shapes of mountains, rocks, trees, pavilions, and small boats.How these images are created, or the nature of the medium from which they are fashioned, isdifficult at first to judge. But like a magician explaining to his audience how a trick is performed,Xu Bing invites viewers to inspect the area behind the cases. What they discover there is astrangely heterodox combination of materials: items that might have been salvaged from adustbin or discovered on the street. Taped directly to the frosted glass panes or held in place by modelling clay, bricks, and fishing wire are wads of cotton, pieces of paper, unraveled hemp,grass, sticks, and tree twigs (fig. XXXIV). The relative clarity with which the materials can be seenon the opposite recto side depends on how closely they are placed to the pane of glass and onhow they are lighted from above and behind.

4

Michael Podro, ‘Depiction and the Golden

Calf’, in Norman Bryson (ed.), Visual

Theory: Painting and Interpretation, New

York, Icon Editions/Harper Collins, 1991,

p. 185. Podro’s theories of representation

are treated more fully in his book,

Depiction, New Haven and London, Yale

University Press, 1998.

5

Jennifer Church, ‘ “Seeing as” and the

double bind of consciousness’, Journal of

Consciousness Studies 7, nos. 8/9 (2000), p. 109.

6

Thus far Xu Bing has created four Back-

ground Story installations: in 2004 in Berlin,

in 2006 at the Gwangju Biennale and the

Suzhou Museum, and in 2008 at the

China Academy of Art, Hangzhou. The

works have been identified as Background

Story 1, 2, 3, and 4. As with many of his

site-specific works, the installations were

temporary, creating a difficult problem in

the choice of verb tenses to be used in

describing them. Generally I write about

the works in the present tense, from the

point of view of someone seeing them

during the periods they were on display

in the three locations, as recorded in

documentary photographs. For the Berlin

installations, see Xu Bing in Berlin, pp.

80–5. For the installation in Gwangju, see

Gwangju Biennale 2006, Gwangju Biennale

2006: Fever Variations, 2 vols, Seoul, Design-

house Co., 2006, 1: pp. 108–9, 2: pp. 62–3,

205. For an account of the installation at

the Suzhou Museum, see Zhang Quan,

‘Xu Bing zai Beihou de gushi zhong

miaoshule liangge shijie’ (Xu Bing

described two worlds in Background Story).

http://www.xubing.com/ index.php/

chinese/texts/xubing–backgroundstory/.

7

The Museum of East Asian Art and the

Museum of Indian Art were merged in

2006 and now operate under the new

name Museum of Asian Art.

XXXIVXu Bing, detail of reverse of Background Story

XXXXu Bing, detail of a page from Book from the Sky

XXXIIXu Bing, Landscript (from the Himalaya sketchbook), 1999, sketchbook, ink on Nepalese paper, 21� 16 cm (closed)

XXXIIIXu Bing, Book from

the Ground, 2003–ongoing,

working proof of pages fromXu Bing’s ‘novel’

XXXIPractising in the square word calligraphy classroomtop: Xu Bing, An Introduction to Square WordCalligraphy; bottom:Xu Bing, Square Word Calligraphy Red Line Tracing Book, both ‘standardedition’, 1996

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XXXVIIXu Bing, Background Story (front views)

背后的故事, 2004, various materials and natural debris attached to 3 frosted glasspanels, glass panels: 184� 367 cm each.

Realized for ‘Xu Bing in Berlin’, Museum für Ostasiatische Kunst, Berlin, 2004

XXXVAnonymous, Landscape, Momoyama period, Japan, c. 1600, six-panel screen, ink and light colours on paper,150� 360 cm. Stolen by the Red Army during the SecondWorld War; whereabouts unknown

XXXVIDai Jin (1388–1462), Birthday Celebration inthe Pine Pavilion, Ming dynasty, China, secondhalf of fifteenth century, hanging scroll, ink andlight colours on silk, 183� 108 cm. Stolen bythe Red Army during the Second World War;whereabouts unknown

39

Although the resulting images look like shadows, and Xu Bing has spoken of these works as attempts to capture the ‘shadow’ or spirit of landscape, he points out that actual shadows playonly a small role in the installations: it is the shapes of the objects themselves seen through theglass that create the virtual landscapes.8Most remarkably, the installations employ one medium— a bizarre form of relief sculpture on the verso side of the glass — to create the illusion, on therecto, not of landscape but of landscape paintings in a completely different medium: ink on paperor silk.9 What the unsightly arrays of trash behind the glass panes are designed to represent arenot simply mountains, water, or buildings, but ink washes, modulated contour lines, and texture strokes that constitute the basic pictorial vocabulary of East Asian painting.

The title Background Story can be understood as an allusion to the history of how works in theBerlin museum were lost during wartime and as a reference to the unusual process throughwhich Xu Bing re-created them. Using the traditional nomenclature of Chinese painting andcalligraphy criticism, what Xu Bing achieved combines aspects of freehand copying, or lin 臨,which preserves an original composition but introduces variations and simplifications ofbrushwork, and creative reinterpretation, or fang仿, which more freely distills essential traitsof an artist’s style.10 To re-create a landscape screen painted in ink on paper by an unidentifiedJapanese artist of the late Momoyama period (1568–1603), Xu Bing radically altered the proportionsof the original composition by eliminating the extensive area of sky indicated by empty paperin the Japanese painting and by simplifying and elongating horizontally the landscape scene(fig. XXXV and first panel of fig. XXXVII). For his re-creation of a vertical hanging scroll by the Mingartist Dai Jin (1388–1462), Birthday Celebration in the Pine Pavilion, painted in ink and light colourson silk, Xu Bing excerpted and reconfigured a passage from the lower section of the scroll, modifying the composition and eliminating the figures and a donkey seen in the original (fig. XXXVI and third panel of fig. XXXVII).

Xu Bing’s re-creations of paintings stolen from the Museum of East Asian Art in Berlin werelike disembodied spirits summoned back fleetingly in an altered but recognizable corporealform. Two later Background Story installations were based on paintings that still exist. For the2006 Gwangju Biennale, Xu Bing produced a monumental version of an album painting by the Korean artist Huh Baek-ryun (1891–1977), transforming this modest work into a nine-metre-widevista of towering mountains, islands studded with trees, and misty peaks rising in the distance(figs XXXVIII, XXXIX). In order for thematerials arranged behind the glass panes in the Background Storyinstallations to appear in the correct orientation on the opposite side, the original compositionson which they are based have to be flipped or reversed. Evidence of this process in action can beseen in a photograph taken during the production of the installation in Gwangju, where reversedprint-outs of the Huh Baek-ryun painting are taped to the glass as visual guides for Xu Bing andhis assistants as they go about their work (fig. XL).11

Of the paintings Xu Bing re-created, the most visually complex is a scroll by the seventeenth-century master Gong Xian (1618–89) in the Suzhou Museum (fig. XLI), the model for BackgroundStory 3 (fig. XLII). Gong Xian, who spent most of his career in Nanjing, belonged to a generationof artists known as yimin — people who had come of age under the Ming Dynasty (1368–1644)but lived to see the conquest of China by the Manchus in 1644. In his landscapes, which havebeen interpreted as scenes of desolation reflecting the dynastic and political cataclysm theartist witnessed, Gong Xian developed a distinctive technique of building forms through quivering, dry brush-strokes that overlap to suggest volumetric landscape forms. To re-createthese effects presented a challenge for which Xu Bing’s earlier experiments in Berlin and Gwangju

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XXXVIIIHuh Baek-ryun (1891–1977), untitled landscape, posthumously called Monastery Away from Bustle, also sometimes referred to as Rivers and Mountains Without End 寺在塵外 (Saejaejinoi), c. 1930–50 India ink on Korean paper, 46�139 cm

XLCreating Background Story 2, in Gwangju, 2006

8

Gwangju Biennale, Gwangju Biennale:

Fever Variations, 1: p. 108. For a description

of Chinese shadow puppetry, which Xu

Bing’s works recall, see Nancy Zeng

Berliner, Chinese Folk Art: The Small Skills of

Carving Insects, Boston, Little, Brown, 1986.

9

The effect of one material or medium

evoking another in the Background Story

installations recalls that seen in dalishi or

‘picture stones’. These are slabs of marble

— the most desirable come from Yunan or

Dali — that are imagined to resemble

landscapes, or rather, landscape paintings.

What the viewer sees — and in this lies

the fascination of these objects — are not

simply shapes that resemble mountains

or waterfalls but natural patterns that

look like brushwork in the styles of various

landscape masters. See Robert E. Harrist,

Jr., ‘Mountains, rocks, and picture stones:

forms of visual imagination in China’,

Orientations (December 2003), pp. 39–45.

10

For a discussion of terms for methods of

replication in Chinese calligraphy, later

applied to painting, see Fu Shen et al.,

Traces of the Brush: Studies in Chinese

Calligraphy, New Haven, Yale University

Art Gallery, 1977, pp. 3–4.

11

The process of thinking in reverse is

something at which Xu Bing has long

been adept – extending back to his early

training as a designer of woodblock prints,

in which a carved design is reversed in

the printing process, and his laborious

carving of pieces of wooden type for Book

from the Sky, in which the relief forms of

the graphs were reversed in the printed

volumes.

XXXIXXu Bing, Background Story 2 背后的故事2, 2006, trash and natural debris attached to frosted glass panel. Glass panel: 990 � 300 cm; overall: 990 � 300 � 40 cm

Installation from ‘Gwangju Biennale 2006: Fever Variations’, Gwangju, Korea, 2006

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had gradually prepared him. More than in any of the other Background Story installations, the contrast between the seemingly chaotic array of materials, in this case skeins of hemp and |various plants, and the illusion of richly textured brushwork they create is astonishing (figs XLII, XLIV).

Background Story 3 at the Suzhou Museum also evokes a strong sense of ‘hand’, of the tactile dialogue between the brush and painting surface that lies at the heart of the Chinese paintingtradition. Xu Bing’s success in creating this effect was emphasized by placing the Gong Xian scrollin the same gallery, thus staging a visual and historical dialogue between the two works and reminding the viewer, by the physical presence of the original, that what Xu Bing had createdwas a replica, though one radically different in scale and in medium. The installation also produces a visual and art-historical pun that cognoscenti of Chinese painting who look behindthe glass pane would easily grasp. In Chinese painting criticism, long, ropey applications of inklike those in the Gong Xian painting are known as ‘hemp-fibre’ texture strokes. Turning thiscenturies-old metaphor into a material fact, Xu Bing reproduced the effect of Gong Xian’sbrushwork through the use of real hemp.

Although each Background Story looks like a large-scale ink landscape painting produced throughmovements of a painter’s hand, wrist, and arm, this effect is not the result of gestural motionsor painting of any kind but is generated by the unusual process Xu Bing invented for these works.He explains that his technique of placing objects behind frosted glass would not be suitable forreproducing paintings on a small scale because the shapes created in this way are too diffuseand too generalized to replicate details of brushwork easily achieved by a landscapist workingwith brush and ink. Xu Bing points out also that the method he developed for the BackgroundStory series, which is well suited to creating the illusion of broad ink washes and contour linestypical of Chinese paintings, would not work for the reproduction of Western paintings basedon gradations of colour and shading.

Some of the forms seen through the frosted glass can be recognized as actual plants. In these passages, small fragments of nature stand in for their larger counterparts — a twig, for example,representing an entire tree, or rather, evoking the conventions of brushwork through whichtrees are represented in traditional Chinese painting. But in most areas the relationship between the assembled objects and the forms they represent is indirect and ambiguous. Viewedfrom the recto side of a milky pane of glass, draped hemp or crumpled paper are unrecognizable,transformed into the illusion of ink-painted mountains or clouds — an illusion dispelled, ofcourse, by exposing these materials to the viewer.

Xu Bing’s process of transforming perceptions of his medium differs radically from the approachof another contemporary artist, Kara Walker, whose work also incorporates shadowy back-lightedforms. In Walker’s recent films the viewer is constantly aware that what is being manipulatedbehind a screen are paper-cut silhouettes — a reductive medium that ‘calls up a stereotypical response’ to ideas about race and physiognomy that her art aggressively challenges and subverts(fig. XLIII).12 For Walker, recognition that the medium is exactly what it appears to be is essential tothe power of her images. For Xu Bing, the viewer’s experience of a Background Story is completeonly when the illusion of one medium — ink painting — is discovered to be nothing more than a jerry-built assemblage of three-dimensional objects behind a pane of glass. Ann Wilson Lloydwrites that when the secret is revealed, when the illusory nature of Xu Bing’s constructed land-scape paintings becomes apparent, then ‘[w]ith the detachment of a Zen master, the artist …

12

Interview with Kara Walker by Elizabeth

Armstrong, in Richard Flood et al.,

no place (like home), Minneapolis,

Walker Art Center, 1997, p. 160.

XLIGong Xian (1618–89), Landscape (detail), handscroll, ink on paper, 35� 283.3 cm

XLIIXu Bing, Background Story 3 背后的故事3, 2006, various materials and natural debris attached to frosted glass panel, 170 � 900 cm.Installation view from ‘Xu Bing’, Suzhou Museum, 2006

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XLIVXu Bing, reverse side detail of Background Story 3, 2006

dashes our perceptions, exposing the humble materials with which he fabricated his shadowimages’.13 But in shattering the illusion, in exposing how the magic is achieved, Xu Bing demonstrates once again how a work art arises from the transformation of inert material into anew reality embodying feelings and ideas inexpressible through other means — a transformationthat yields a dynamic relationship ‘between outward appearance and inner content’.14

Xu Bing likens the pane of frosted glass through which a Background Story landscape is seen to afilter. Material or cognitive, a filter transforms what passes through it in two ways, blocking outsome things while letting others pass through. As his work over the past twenty years shouldprepare us to expect, what we think we see through the filtering glass Xu Bing places before usis very different from what is really there. Ultimately, the filter that Xu Bing wishes us to understand probably is that of the mind itself — a filter woven from our cultures, languages,and personal histories. The filter of the mind grants only limited access to the world, but it isthrough this imperfect screen, both opaque and translucent, receptive to some stimuli butoblivious to others, that art and reality are perceived.

XLIIIKara Walker, 8 Possible Beginnings or:The Creation of African-America, a Moving Picture, 2005, still from 16-mmfilm and video transferred to DVD, black and white, sound, 15:57 min

13

Ann Wilson Lloyd, op. cit., pp. 28–9.

14

Xu Bing uses this phrase in describing

Introduction to Square Word Calligraphy:

‘The greatest existing contradiction is

between outward appearance and inner

content. It’s like wearing a mask. It gives

you something familiar or unfamiliar,

but you can’t figure out exactly what is

going on.’ This statement could well apply

to much of Xu Bing’s art. The interview

conducted by Peggy Wang in 2006

appears in Wu Hung, Shu: Reinventing

Books in Contemporary Chinese Art, New York,

China Institute in America, 2006, p. 89.