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 frompieces of wooden type he designed and carved. When first exhibited in Beijing in
1988, these volumes, known collectively as Book fromthe 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 fromthe 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 fromthe 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 formof writing, graphs assembled fromthe 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: Romanletters spelling the words of nursery rhymes, sayings fromChairman
Mao, or exhibition titles (fig. XXXI). Bird Language, from2003, consists of a set of metal birdcages;
but the skeins of wire that formthe 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 firmink 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 fromthe 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 newscript, 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 brush-
strokes 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.
32
1
Book fromthe Sky, originally titled A Book
fromthe Sky: The Mirror of the World An
Analyzed Reflection of the End of this Century,
has beenshown in various configurations
throughout the world. The best intro-
ductions to Book fromthe 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 XuBing, Madison, Wisconsin,
ElvehjemMuseumof 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. XuBings webpage, http://www.
xubing.com, is the most complete online
record of his career. For this essay, I have
relied especially on Museumfr Ostaisi-
atische Kunst, XuBinginBerlin: Sprachrume
(Berlin: Museumfr Ostasiatische Kunst,
2004). Unless otherwise indicated,
statements or information attributed to
Xu Bing are frominterviews conducted at
his studio in Brooklyn, NewYork, on
14 September and 13 November 2007 .
2
Xu Bing, Regarding Book fromthe 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 formof decon-
struction, parallellingthat of philosopher
Jacques Derrida. See Ann Wilson Lloyd,
Vanishing ink, in Xu Bing in Berlin, p. 25.
XXIX
Xu Bing, Bird Language wk 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, 20034
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 [134850] by Huang Gongwang [12691354].)
35 34
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 howthey 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 fromthe fact that pictures showthe 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 fromthe mediumin
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 seemto be
an appearance of some further object.
5
Virtual forms that seemto 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 mediumby
once again showing the viewer things that are not what they first appear.
6
Xu Bing began this
series in 2004 while a fellowat the American Academy in Berlin. While living in the city, he was
asked to prepare a solo exhibition at the Museumof East Asian Art (Museumfr Ostasiatische
Kunst).
7
The museumwas 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 fromthe 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.
Howthese images are created, or the nature of the mediumfromwhich they are fashioned, is
difficult at first to judge. But like a magician explaining to his audience howa 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 froma
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 howclosely they are placed to the pane of glass and on
howthey are lighted fromabove 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. Podros theories of representation
are treated more fully in his book,
Depiction, NewHaven 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 problemin
the choice of verb tenses to be used in
describing them. Generally I write about
the works in the present tense, fromthe
point of viewof 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, Design-
house 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 Museumof East Asian Art and the
Museumof Indian Art were merged in
2006 and nowoperate under the new
name Museumof Asian Art.
XXXIV
Xu Bing, detail of reverse of
Background Story
XXX
Xu Bing, detail of a page from Book from the Sky
XXXII
Xu Bing, Landscript (from the Himalaya sketchbook), 1999,
sketchbook, ink on Nepalese paper, 2116 cm (closed)
XXXIII
Xu Bing, Book from
the Ground,
2003ongoing,
working proof of pages from
Xu Bings novel
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
37 36
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
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 (13881462), 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
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 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 formof 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 howworks in the
Berlin museumwere 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 fromthe 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 fromthe Museumof 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 albumpainting 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 seventeenth-
century 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 cataclysmthe
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
38
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. 193050
India ink on Korean paper, 46139 cm
XL
Creating Background Story 2, in Gwangju, 2006
8
Gwangju Biennale, Gwangju Biennale:
Fever Variations, 1: p. 108. For a description
of Chinese shadowpuppetry, whichXu
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 fromYunan 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 inthe 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, NewHaven, 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
fromthe Sky, in which the relief forms of
the graphs were reversed in the printed
volumes.
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
41 40
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 Museumalso 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
fromthe 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 mediumdiffers radically fromthe 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 mediumthat 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 mediumis 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 land-
scape paintings becomes apparent, then [w]ith the detachment of a Zen master, the artist
12
Interviewwith Kara Walker by Elizabeth
Armstrong, in Richard Flood et al.,
no place (like home), Minneapolis,
Walker Art Center, 1997, p. 160.
XLI
Gong Xian (161889), Landscape (detail), handscroll, ink on paper, 35283.3 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
43 42
XLIV
Xu Bing, reverse side detail of Background Story 3, 2006
dashes our perceptions, exposing the humble materials with which he fabricated his shadow
images.
13
But in shattering the illusion, in exposing howthe magic is achieved, Xu Bing
demonstrates once again howa work art arises fromthe transformation of inert material into a
newreality 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 fromwhat is really there. Ultimately, the filter that Xu Bing wishes us to
understand probably is that of the mind itself a filter woven fromour 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.
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
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 inContemporary Chinese Art, NewYork,
China Institute in America, 2006, p. 89.