May Issue 2001
The North Carolina Museum Of Art Presents A Site-Specific Installation By Chinese Artist Xu Bing
Reading Landscape, a provocative installation by internationally recognized Chinese artist Xu Bing, opened Apr. 29 at the North Carolina Museum of Art in Raleigh, NC. The commissioned project, on view through Aug. 5, asks viewers a variety of questions about language and perception. What connects an object with the word that represents it? Where does the natural world end and our shared perception of it begin? What are the boundaries of a work of art? How does a viewer's imaginative interaction with art expand on its presentation?
"Xu's 'character garden,' as he called it, will provide a witty interaction between East and West, nature and art, word and image," said Huston Paschal, exhibition curator and the Museum's associate curator of modern art. "Playing off the real landscape visible through one of the Museum's windows and two painted landscapes from the Museum's collection, Xu immerses visitors in an illusory scene where the power of language and the power of nature are interwoven.
For Reading Landscape, Xu uses the view through the window of an entrance-level gallery as the basis for creating an interior landscape complete with trees, water, birds and clouds. In each case, these natural objects are represented by their respective Chinese characters, which are constructed out of plywood or Plexiglas and affixed to the wall, floor or ceiling. (Xu created a similar two-dimensional work for the 12th Biennial of Sidney, Australia; for the Museum's project, the approach evolves into three dimensions.) Additionally, the artist plans to incorporate two paintings from the Museum's permanent collection in the installation - Joos de Momper's Landscape with a Bridge (c. 1625-30) and Neil Welliver's "Breached Beaver Dam" (1975)- and has created his own version of a third work from the Museum's collection, Adolph Gottlieb's "Incubus" (1947), for inclusion as well. The Gottlieb is on view in an adjacent gallery.
Born in 1955 in Chongqing, China, Xu Bing began his education in socialist schools, a schooling that continued through Mao's Cultural Revolution (1966-76) and then expanded - globally - in the more relaxed atmosphere after Mao's death. In the notorious 1989 China/Avant-Garde exhibition at the National Fine Art Museum in Beijing, Xu's installation Book from the Sky combined draped scrolls with rows of opened books hand-printed with authentic-looking but ultimately indecipherable Chinese characters of the artist's own design; though the installation baffled Chinese ideologues, it received a warm reception from other artists and brought Xu to the attention of the West.
Within a year of the exhibition, the cataclysmic Tiananmen Square confrontation had turned Chinese avant-garde artists into personae non gratae, and Xu had immigrated to the United States. Since that time, Xu has been prolific, with projects commissioned by museums around the globe - and many of these projects often used language and letterforms to comment on cross-cultural affairs. Known for making Asian art and ways of thinking accessible to Western audiences, Xu has also invented a hybrid language he calls New English Calligraphy, which embeds English words within Chinese characters and which was used on banners at New York's Museum of Modern Art and at Duke University.
"Xu has certainly been one of the leading artists to emerge from the Chinese avant garde," said Paschal. "The attention he has received in the West has been important not only to the development of his career but also to international recognition of contemporary Asian art and artists in general."
For further information check our NC Institutional Gallery listings or call the museum at 919/839-6262.
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