15 Facts About Xu Bing

1.

Xu Bing is a Chinese artist who served as vice-president of the Central Academy of Fine Arts.

2.

Xu Bing is known for his printmaking skills and installation art, as well as his creative artistic use of language, words, and text and how they have affected our understanding of the world.

3.

Xu Bing is an AD White Professor-at-Large at Cornell University.

4.

Xu Bing was awarded the MacArthur Fellows Program in 1999 and the Fukuoka Prize in 2003.

5.

Xu Bing's father was the head of the history department at Peking University.

6.

Xu Bing then resided to the United States until his appointment as vice-president of the Beijing CAFA in 2008.

7.

Xu Bing won a half year of free work and study at the American Academy in Berlin 2004.

8.

Xu Bing was appointed the new vice president of the Central Academy of Fine Arts, March 2008.

9.

In 1987, Xu Bing returned to his training in printmaking to create large and elaborate installation pieces like Book from the Sky and Ghosts Pounding the Wall.

10.

Xu Bing's Tianshu is a large installation featuring precisely laid out rows of books and hanging scrolls with written "Chinese" texts.

11.

Xu Bing infuses his work with meaning by stirring confusion and discomfort in his audience, mostly due to the fact that the Chinese characters used in these texts are not "real" characters.

12.

Xu Bing called this New English Calligraphy, and gave lessons in how to write the characters.

13.

In 2022, Xu Bing created a version of Background Story for Cornell University's Herbert F Johnson Museum of Art based on a Ming Dynasty work in its collection, Woodcutter in Winter Mountains, by Yang Xun.

14.

In 2008, after returning to China to take the position at the Central Academy of Fine Arts, Xu Bing was asked to create a sculpture for the atrium of the World Financial Center, which was then being developed in Beijing.

15.

Xu Bing plays incessantly with the role, purpose, and reality of language.