Xu Bing - Influences and Themes

Influences and Themes

Xu Bing's art mostly reflects cultural issues which raged during his early life in tumultuous China. Most notably, the cultural and linguistic reforms enacted by the Communist Party in China under Mao Zedong’s leadership weigh heavily on modern Chinese artists who lived through this period. Similarly, the Cultural Revolution (1966-1976) also rankles the modern Chinese artistic consciousness even though different artists have focused on different angles. Xu Bing in particular plays with the notion of the paradox between the power and fickleness of language, of what it means to be human, and of how our perceptions color our worldview.

Xu Bing plays incessantly with the role, purpose, and reality of language. Early in his life his father would make him write a page of characters a day, encouraging him to not only copy their form to perfection, but also to capture their spirit, their essence. During Mao’s cultural reformations and the reorganization of the standard Chinese language, Xu Bing experienced the constant reformation of words. This constant linguistic change influenced his art: Xu Bing emphasizes the immortality of the essence of language while vividly illustrating the impermanence and capriciousness of words themselves. In this way language becomes malleable and it can be fashioned to either liberate or control. Just as it is nigh impossible to detangle life from politics during the Cultural Revolution era (and its ramifications in decades to follow), Xu Bing also intertwines political messages into his art.

It was not until 2008 that Xu Bing set aside his post-Maoist reactionary art and invested in other topics. For example, he took on environmental projects such as Forest Project, which encouraged the “uninterrupted flow of funds from developed countries to Kenya, earmarked for the planting of new trees.” Even so, his focus is always on the effect that environmental issues have on people, such as the villages in Kenya, not necessarily the effects on the landscape or on the political situation.

At the turn of the millennium, a new defining social pattern emerged after the terrorist attacks in the United States on 9/11, 2001. Tension grew between the West and the Middle East, finally exploding into what was labeled as “the War on Terror.” This situation gave rise to social themes of anxiety and hopelessness seep, which eventually have seeped into the realm of the arts. Even so, some artists like Xu Bing chose to explore the serenity found in the midst of chaos, as illustrated in his work Where does the Dust Itself Collect? (2004, 2011). For this piece, the artist gathered dust from the aftermath of the collapse of the Twin Towers in New York after September 11, 2001, and uses it to recreate the gray film that covered Manhattan in the weeks following the attacks. Stenciled in the dust, a Buddhist poem reads, “As there is nothing from the first, where does the dust itself collect?” Using this tragedy as an expression of the human narrative, Xu Bing contemplates the relationship between the material and the spiritual, and he explores “the complicated circumstances created by different world perspectives.”