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- Bing Xu

Bing Xu

Xu Bing graduated from the Printmaking Department of the Central Academy of Fine Arts, Beijing, in 1977. In 1989 he participated in the pioneering and seminal Chinese contemporary art exhibition “China Avant-Garde” at the National Gallery in Beijing. A year later Xu became an honorary fellow at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and began to exhibit internationally, gaining worldwide prominence as an artist and educator. In 2007 Xu returned to the Central Academy of Fine Arts as vice president.

Xu Bing is deeply interested in notions of language, symbols and books. His project The Book from the Sky in 1988 brought him international prominence. In his Landscript series Xu paints Chinese radicals and characters to build landscapes. In his New English Calligraphy works Xu demonstrates the universality of calligraphy as a form of art and its accessibility to all audiences by writing English words disguised as Chinese ideograms. Xu’s works express a deep skepticism towards the reliability and integrity of language, demonstrating how meanings of the written word can be easily manipulated.