I noted with pleasure that Xu Bing, an artist whose work I have marveled at several times before, is the subject of a retrospective at the Ullens Center for Contemporary Art in the 798 Art District, and just in time for me to catch it! It was lovely to see his early printmaking work, before he became fascinated by script, and then caught the conceptual bug. The exhibition was so laid out that his most famous work, "Book from the Sky," greeted you as you entered and also as you departed; I knew it from "Ink Art" at the Met.
But the venture of it is astounding all over again - creating 4000 imaginary yet still plausible archaic Chinese characters, carving wood blocks for them, and printing a book nobody could ever read, what a
labor of - is it love? I certainly felt something like love at some tables where we were invited to pen some of these characters, on sheets exactly like those used by calligraphy students for real characters. (His effort to create "square" letters of words in Roman alphabet seems more of a gimmick to me, though these are actually readable with some practice.) Great fun also the rubbing he and some friends made of an entire tower along the Great Wall, which he took with him when he left for 18 years in the US. His work there seems a
little precious to me; I guess he had to become a "Chinese" or "Asian" artist, and picked up hints of "eastern" ways of thinking, etc. Religious resonances arise, as in the carpet he made for a Buddhist temple 'in
Hong Kong (can you read it?). A room of tobacco-based work produced on a fellowship in Virginia was especially odd. Still, his best work remains breathtaking: the "phoenix" of construction waste which I saw in the
Cathedral of Saint John the Divine (represented here by photos and sketches), and a fascinating new project which recreates lost masterpieces of landscape painting with unexpected materials pressing against an opaque glass surface. (I saw another at the Beida-Sackler.) No idea how it works, but how it works!
But the venture of it is astounding all over again - creating 4000 imaginary yet still plausible archaic Chinese characters, carving wood blocks for them, and printing a book nobody could ever read, what a
labor of - is it love? I certainly felt something like love at some tables where we were invited to pen some of these characters, on sheets exactly like those used by calligraphy students for real characters. (His effort to create "square" letters of words in Roman alphabet seems more of a gimmick to me, though these are actually readable with some practice.) Great fun also the rubbing he and some friends made of an entire tower along the Great Wall, which he took with him when he left for 18 years in the US. His work there seems a 
little precious to me; I guess he had to become a "Chinese" or "Asian" artist, and picked up hints of "eastern" ways of thinking, etc. Religious resonances arise, as in the carpet he made for a Buddhist temple 'in
Hong Kong (can you read it?). A room of tobacco-based work produced on a fellowship in Virginia was especially odd. Still, his best work remains breathtaking: the "phoenix" of construction waste which I saw in the Cathedral of Saint John the Divine (represented here by photos and sketches), and a fascinating new project which recreates lost masterpieces of landscape painting with unexpected materials pressing against an opaque glass surface. (I saw another at the Beida-Sackler.) No idea how it works, but how it works!
