Xu Bing, Background Story: A New Approach to Landscape Painting | Page 6
FOREWORD
Xu Bing is an artist whose career I’ve had the good fortune to
in the museum’s central Paige Court area. Entitled The Glassy
follow for almost my entire museum career. I first encountered
Surface of a Lake, this large and awe-inspiring installation
him just after the Tiananmen Square protests of 1989. At
remained on view for one year, from March 27, 2004 through
that point he was already an assistant professor at the Central
June 19, 2005. The exhibition Xu Bing: The Glassy Surface of a
Academy of Fine Art (CAFA) in Beijing. Like so many of the
Lake (September 4 – November 28, 2004) was intended to put
artistic community who thought it might be better to leave
the installation of the same name into the broader context of Xu
China during the political turmoil of the time, he landed in
Bing’s contemporary work.
Madison due to a friend who was studying at the UW–Madison.
Impressed with his drawings and the photographs of his work
prominence to such a degree that in 2007 he was invited
that he showed me at our first meeting, I offered to mount
back to China to assume the vice presidency of CAFA in
an exhibition of his work at the then Elvehjem Museum of
Beijing. Although he still maintains a studio in Brooklyn, New
Art. Three Installations by Xu Bing: A Book from the Sky, Ghosts
York, he now spends much of his time introducing young
Pounding the Wall, and Five Series of Repetitions (November
Chinese students to the ideas and complexities of the global
30, 1991–January 19, 1992), which resulted from that first
contemporary art world.
meeting, proved very successful and helped to establish the
artist’s reputation not only locally but also nationally. Xu Bing
and I maintained a casual contact during the subsequent years.
I was not only interested in following the career of this brilliant
and highly creative individual, but also in seeing how immersion
in the Western art scene would affect his art. In 2003, Xu Bing
returned to the Elvehjem to create a site-specific installation
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Xu Bing’s successes as an artist raised him to international
time that I had met him, I travelled to Beijing to visit artists’
use brush, ink or paper. In keeping with the strong contemporary
studios. During my visit, Xu Bing took me to see his most
inclination among visual artists toward non-traditional and unusual
recent exhibition Background Story: Dwelling in Fuchun
media, he recreates the image of Dwelling in the Fuchun Mountains
Mountains at the Inside-Out Art Museum in the Haidian
using natural and manufactured debris: dried plants, leaves and
district of Beijing. Although I had seen several examples
grasses, roots and branches of various trees, plastic and paper bags,
from the Background Story series, I was stunned by this most
bits of discarded paper and cardboard, used mailing tubes, and
recent manifestation. It was significantly grander in ambition,
plastic netting, among others. They are judiciously arranged and
scale, and complexity than any of the earlier versions. I
lighted behind a semitransparent glass front plate. What the viewer
became determined to bring it to Madison; especially as
sees is a construction of silhouettes and shadows that precisely
its presentation at the Chazen would offer UW students
recreates the fourteenth-century master’s brush painting of a
as well as our public visitors a ra ɔ