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Background Stories: Xu Bings Art of Transformation

Robert E. Harrist, Jr.

Over twenty years have passed since Xu Bing began work on a set of beautifully crafted volumes printed from pieces of wooden type he designed and carved. When first exhibited in Beijing in 1988, these volumes, known collectively as Book from the Sky, appeared to consist of thousands of pages 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 was seen to contain nothing but meaningless graphs invented by Xu Bing. As this transformation of apparent meaning into revealed nonsense took place, there began a dialogue between Xu Bing and the viewers of his work, a dialogue that continues to this day, in which he shows us one thing 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 hidden semantic content. Various works that feature Xu Bings 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 as what they really are: Roman letters spelling the words of nursery rhymes, sayings from Chairman Mao, 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 of questions 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 drawings produced between 1999 and 2004, titled collectively Landscript, represent spacious vistas rendered in firm ink strokes on paper; but the landscape elements are actually Chinese characters arranged so that the character shi or stone, for example, repeated in various sizes, indicates cliffs or embankments, while clusters of the character cao , which means grass, represent verdant fields (figs XXI, XXXII). Immediately familiar pictorial forms that gradually reveal unexpected semantic content appear in one of Xu Bings most recent projects, Book from the Ground. For this ongoing experimental work, shown in installations that have included wall texts and computer screens, Xu Bing collected pre-existing logos that constitute a banal lingua franca of international travel and advertising, displayed in airports and other public spaces.2 In his hands, these familiar signs have turned into units of a new script, legible to speakers of any language, that Xu Bing has 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 through which words, pictures, and everyday objects are perceived and understood.3 He gives us in return brilliant hybrids: printed graphs that resemble Chinese but are not; elegant Chinese brushstrokes that spell English words; landscapes made out of writing. In these works, Xu Bing stages recurring dramas of transformation, insisting that we witness one thing turning into something else. But he also makes sure that the transformations are never complete. Forms and meanings oscillate and change, flipping back and forth between one state and another, writing and nonsense, Chinese and English, pictures and words.

XXIX Xu Bing, Bird Language , 2003, 4 sound-activated toy birds, 4 brass and 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 23 cm; 27 23 23 cm. Installation view from Xu Bing, Chinese Arts Centre, Manchester, 2003 4

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 introductions 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 Institution/Seattle, University of Washington Press, 2001. Xu Bings webpage, http://www. xubing.com, is the most complete online record of his career. For this essay, I have relied especially on Museum fr Ostaisiatische Kunst, Xu Bing in Berlin: Sprachrume (Berlin: Museum fr 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. 705. 3 Critics and art historians have likened Xu Bings artistic practice to a form of deconstruction, parallelling that of philosopher Jacques Derrida. See Ann Wilson Lloyd, Vanishing ink, in Xu Bing in Berlin, p. 25.

XVIII Xu Bing, Background Story 4 (front view) 4, 2004, various materials and natural debris attached to frosted acrylic panels, acrylic panels: 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 [12691354].)

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In addition to obscuring boundaries between different languages and different forms of visual communication, Xu Bings protean inventions embody an essential insight into the nature of art 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 immediate physical presence of the object presented to the viewer. In describing this phenomenon, Xu Bing has cited a precept in Sunzis Art of War: make a noise in the east, attack in the west. The material substance of the work of art the noise in the east is like a strategic feint that facilitates the attack in the west the production in the viewers mind of a flash of insight or feeling that is the artists 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, or some other medium. To be seen as a picture, a painting or drawing must be perceived as both form-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 Michael Podro, the subject (of the picture) must be seen and conceived as distinct from the medium in which it is represented, unless we suffer delusion.4 The philosopher Jennifer Church explains the phenomenon in this way: What seems to be an object the painting will also seem to be an 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 Bings experiments in which strange graphs hover between different languages or a birdcage functions as a discourse on art. In a recent series of installations, each titled Background Story (Biehou de gushi ), Xu Bing not 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 by once again showing the viewer things that are not what they first appear.6 Xu Bing began this series in 2004 while a fellow at the American Academy in Berlin. While living in the city, he was asked to prepare a solo exhibition at the Museum of East Asian Art (Museum fr Ostasiatische Kunst).7 The museum was founded in 1906, but at the end of the Second World War almost ninety per cent of its collection of paintings and other objects was looted by the Red Army and taken 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). Visible behind 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, is difficult 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 a strangely heterodox combination of materials: items that might have been salvaged from a dustbin 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 seen on the opposite recto side depends on how closely they are placed to the pane of glass and on how they are lighted from above and behind.

XXXIV Xu Bing, detail of reverse of Background Story

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. Podros 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 Background 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. 805. For the installation in Gwangju, see Gwangju Biennale 2006, Gwangju Biennale 2006: Fever Variations, 2 vols, Seoul, Designhouse Co., 2006, 1: pp. 1089, 2: pp. 623, 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/xubingbackgroundstory/. 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.

XXX Xu Bing, detail of a page from Book from the Sky

XXXI Practising in the square word calligraphy classroom top: Xu Bing, An Introduction to Square Word Calligraphy; bottom: Xu Bing, Square Word Calligraphy Red Line Tracing Book, both standard edition, 1996

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

XXXIII Xu Bing, Book from the Ground, 2003ongoing, working proof of pages from Xu Bings novel

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XXXV Anonymous, 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 Second World War; whereabouts unknown

XXXVI Dai Jin (1388 1462), Birthday Celebration in the Pine Pavilion, Ming dynasty, China, second half of fifteenth century, hanging scroll, ink and light colours on silk, 183 108 cm. Stolen by the Red Army during the Second World War; whereabouts unknown

XXXVII Xu Bing, Background Story (front views) , 2004, various materials and natural debris attached to 3 frosted glass panels, glass panels: 184 367 cm each. Realized for Xu Bing in Berlin, Museum fr Ostasiatische Kunst, Berlin, 2004

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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 play only a small role in the installations: it is the shapes of the objects themselves seen through the glass that create the virtual landscapes.8 Most remarkably, the installations employ one medium a bizarre form of relief sculpture on the verso side of the glass to create the illusion, on the recto, not of landscape but of landscape paintings in a completely different medium: ink on paper or silk.9 What the unsightly arrays of trash behind the glass panes are designed to represent are not 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 the Berlin museum were lost during wartime and as a reference to the unusual process through which Xu Bing re-created them. Using the traditional nomenclature of Chinese painting and calligraphy criticism, what Xu Bing achieved combines aspects of freehand copying, or lin , which preserves an original composition but introduces variations and simplifications of brushwork, and creative reinterpretation, or fang , which more freely distills essential traits of an artists style.10 To re-create a landscape screen painted in ink on paper by an unidentified Japanese artist of the late Momoyama period (15681603), Xu Bing radically altered the proportions of the original composition by eliminating the extensive area of sky indicated by empty paper in 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 Ming artist Dai Jin (13881462), Birthday Celebration in the Pine Pavilion, painted in ink and light colours on 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 Bings re-creations of paintings stolen from the Museum of East Asian Art in Berlin were like disembodied spirits summoned back fleetingly in an altered but recognizable corporeal form. Two later Background Story installations were based on paintings that still exist. For the 2006 Gwangju Biennale, Xu Bing produced a monumental version of an album painting by the Korean artist Huh Baek-ryun (18911977), transforming this modest work into a nine-metre-wide vista of towering mountains, islands studded with trees, and misty peaks rising in the distance (figs XXXVIII, XXXIX). In order for the materials arranged behind the glass panes in the Background Story installations to appear in the correct orientation on the opposite side, the original compositions on which they are based have to be flipped or reversed. Evidence of this process in action can be seen in a photograph taken during the production of the installation in Gwangju, where reversed print-outs of the Huh Baek-ryun painting are taped to the glass as visual guides for Xu Bing and his 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 seventeenthcentury master Gong Xian (161889) in the Suzhou Museum (fig. XLI), the model for Background Story 3 (fig. XLII). Gong Xian, who spent most of his career in Nanjing, belonged to a generation of artists known as yimin people who had come of age under the Ming Dynasty (13681644) but lived to see the conquest of China by the Manchus in 1644. In his landscapes, which have been interpreted as scenes of desolation reflecting the dynastic and political cataclysm the artist witnessed, Gong Xian developed a distinctive technique of building forms through quivering, dry brush-strokes that overlap to suggest volumetric landscape forms. To re-create these effects presented a challenge for which Xu Bings earlier experiments in Berlin and Gwangju

8 Gwangju Biennale, Gwangju Biennale: Fever Variations, 1: p. 108. For a description of Chinese shadow puppetry, which Xu Bings 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. 3945. 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. 34. 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.

XXXVIII Huh Baek-ryun (18911977), untitled landscape, posthumously called Monastery Away from Bustle, also sometimes referred to as Rivers and Mountains Without End (Saejaejinoi), c. 1930 50 India ink on Korean paper, 46 139 cm

XXXIX Xu Bing, Background Story 2 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

XL Creating Background Story 2, in Gwangju, 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 painting tradition. Xu Bings success in creating this effect was emphasized by placing the Gong Xian scroll in 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 created was 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 behind the glass pane would easily grasp. In Chinese painting criticism, long, ropey applications of ink like those in the Gong Xian painting are known as hemp-fibre texture strokes. Turning this centuries-old metaphor into a material fact, Xu Bing reproduced the effect of Gong Xians brushwork through the use of real hemp. Although each Background Story looks like a large-scale ink landscape painting produced through movements of a painters hand, wrist, and arm, this effect is not the result of gestural motions or 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 for reproducing paintings on a small scale because the shapes created in this way are too diffuse and too generalized to replicate details of brushwork easily achieved by a landscapist working with brush and ink. Xu Bing points out also that the method he developed for the Background Story series, which is well suited to creating the illusion of broad ink washes and contour lines typical of Chinese paintings, would not work for the reproduction of Western paintings based on 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 which trees 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. Viewed from 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, of course, by exposing these materials to the viewer. Xu Bings process of transforming perceptions of his medium differs radically from the approach of another contemporary artist, Kara Walker, whose work also incorporates shadowy back-lighted forms. In Walkers recent films the viewer is constantly aware that what is being manipulated behind 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 to the power of her images. For Xu Bing, the viewers experience of a Background Story is complete only 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 Lloyd writes that when the secret is revealed, when the illusory nature of Xu Bings constructed landscape paintings becomes apparent, then [w]ith the detachment of a Zen master, the artist

XLI Gong Xian (1618 89), Landscape (detail), handscroll, ink on paper, 35 283.3 cm

XLII Xu Bing, Background Story 3 3, 2006, various materials and natural debris attached to frosted glass panel, 170 900 cm. Installation view from Xu Bing, Suzhou Museum, 2006

12 Interview with Kara Walker by Elizabeth Armstrong, in Richard Flood et al., no place (like home), Minneapolis, Walker Art Center, 1997, p. 160.

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dashes our perceptions, exposing the humble materials with which he fabricated his shadow images.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 a new reality embodying feelings and ideas inexpressible through other means a transformation that 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 a filter. Material or cognitive, a filter transforms what passes through it in two ways, blocking out some things while letting others pass through. As his work over the past twenty years should prepare us to expect, what we think we see through the filtering glass Xu Bing places before us is 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 is through this imperfect screen, both opaque and translucent, receptive to some stimuli but oblivious to others, that art and reality are perceived.

13 Ann Wilson Lloyd, op. cit., pp. 289. 14 Xu Bing uses this phrase in describing Introduction to Square Word Calligraphy: The greatest existing contradiction is between outward appearance and inner content. Its like wearing a mask. It gives you something familiar or unfamiliar, but you cant figure out exactly what is going on. This statement could well apply to much of Xu Bings 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.

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

XLIV Xu Bing, reverse side detail of Background Story 3, 2006