Xu Bing, The Opening

The Chinese artist, Xu Bing, currently has a work on view in the “Dead or Alive” exhibit at the Museum of Arts and Design. The acclaimed artist Xu Bing has worked in a variety of media throughout his career. His works are original and creative and often related to materials from the natural world. In broken English he spoke about his many projects starting with a piece from 1998 called “The Opening” in which he arranged mulberry tree branches and placed 500 silkworms on the leaves. After two days, the worms had begun to weave silk and the leaves were gone so the arrangement took on a totally different look.

The Dust

Another work called “The Dust” was based on a Zen Buddhist poem from the 7th century whose last line is “Where does the dust itself collect?” Bing collected dust from the World Trade Center site after 9/11 and blew the dust into a sealed off room. The letters were then formed by cleaning the dust off of the floor. This piece, he explained, is about how the material world is related to the spiritual world.

The Tobacco Project, Shanghai

The “Tobacco Project” was comprised of many small works and a huge installation at Duke University where tobacco is a product grown in the state but where there have been many reports of related cancer. Five years later Bing did the tobacco project in Shanghai and made a huge tiger skin- looking rug out of 660,000 cigarettes called “The Carpet: Honor and Spelndor” because those were both names of cigarette brands in China. The work not only demonstrated what the Chinese desired and found cool at that time but it also had an intense smell and visual power strongly impacting viewers.

Backgound Story, 2010

Related to the work Bing has in the group show at MAD, he has created paintings out of trash, bricks, branches and natural materials which he affixes to the back of a lit surface so the image the viewer sees is cast in shadow–the result looks like an ink on paper landscape scroll. He makes copies of Asian scroll paintings of the past, but in this unique medium. In this work he explained that he is asking, “What is Chinese art’s connection with nature? What would Western art’s connection to nature be?” These works are soft and unexpectedly beautiful.

Phoenix Project, 2010

He ended his talk speaking about his latest project, “The Phoenix Project” in Beijing. He was commissioned to create a work for the World Financial Center’s atrium. He does not typically do commissions or public art but when they agreed to financially support the students at the academy where he teaches, he acquiesced. He spent some time with the workers who created the building, and he was intrigued by the contrast of the luxurious new building and their harsh environs so he decided to make two flying cranes out of the debris from the construction site. Cranes are auspicious in CHinese culture, but they are also ridden on one’s way to heaven so they were not a good choice for the owner of the building as he is very old. Bing altered his flying beasts to create two phoenix instead. It turns out that each dynasty had its own representation of the phoenix and after his research, his will be the closest to the Han dynasty’s in appearance. Each phoenix is 90 feet in length and very difficult to make. The works of art ended up being very architectural, almost like enormous buildings–he utitlized cement mixers and shovels and cranes. Using manmade items to imitate the natural and living world these figures are stunning. He placed LED lights strategically on them and therefore at night they look like a constellation from afar.