Beyond The Normative
MuseuM Macan invites you to pause and reflect on your surroundings through the coMprehensive works of Xu Bing
He is one of the most influential Chinese artists on the international stage and now we can experience his inspirational works up close through Museum MACAN’s latest exhibition: “Xu Bing: Thought and Method.” This exhibition is a major retrospective of Xu Bing’s important works and projects, spanning over four decades of his professional career. Xu Bing moved to a commune in the outskirts of Beijing to learn from and assist local farmers during the Cultural Revolution in the 1970s. The experience affected the way he saw language as a political tool.
He began working internationally in the 1980s and emigrated to New York, U.S. in the early 1990s. Moving there has affected Xu Bing’s artistic approach when he started combining elements of Western culture with traditional Chinese cultural traits, also touching cross-cultural issues.
“Xu Bing: Thought and Method is the first and biggest at Xu Bing’s exhibition in Southeast Asia and also doubles as his first major solo presentation in Indonesia. This exhibition features over 60 works, including drawings, prints, installations, films and archival materials. One of his famous works is of course “Book from the Sky” (19871991), an installation of handprinted books descending from the sky that consists of thousands of characters that resemble Chinese characters. But if you look closer, they have no meaning. The artist meticulously hand-carved over four thousand moveable type printing blocks. “Honor and Splendor” (2004) is a 40-foot simulated tiger-skin rug made from 660.000 cigarettes, a part of a larger project called cTobacco Project.” With this installation, Xu Bing is reflecting on the problems and weakness of humanity by exploring the entangled relationship between humans and tobacco.
Xu Bing still explored language with “Square Word Calligraphy” (1994-2019), where he designed a new “species” of calligraphy that combines English words and Chinese characters, whereas with “Book from the Ground Studio” (2003-2019) he uses universal symbols and emoji to make up a story. Exploring with an entire new media, “Dragonfly Eyes” (2017) is Xu Bing’s first feature film created through painstaking compilation of China’s surveillance camera footage that has been made available trough public live-streaming websites since 2015. The exhibition is open for the public until 12 January 2020.