China's Xu Bing Gives Flight To Words at the Morgan

By Stephen Wallis

July 2, 2011

https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424052702304447804576413731008492102

Chinese artist Xu Bing is about to turn New York's Morgan Library & Museum into an installation site. For its second annual contemporary art commission, the Morgan invited Mr. Xu to create a larger version of his well-known work "The Living Word," originally made in 2001. The piece will consist of some 350 carved and painted Chinese characters for the word "bird" in various historical scripts—all hung from the ceiling of the Morgan's soaring entry court in a cloudlike cluster that will rise dramatically from the floor to the top of a 50-foot glass wall.

Along with Ai Weiwei and Cai Guo-Qiang, Mr. Xu is among the most famous of China's New Wave artists who first came to prominence in the 1980s. He moved to New York in 1990 after falling out of favor with the authorities. Though he returned to China in 2008 as vice president of the prestigious Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing, he continues to do projects around the world.

Mr. Xu remains best-known for conceptual works dealing with written texts, often highlighting their unreliability. "He takes a somewhat critical position vis-à-vis the authority of the written word, which you could say for a library is a little ironic," said Isabelle Dervaux, the Morgan's curator of modern and contemporary drawings. "The Living Word" has been shown in the city only once before, when a version sold for $408,000 (a record for the artist) in a landmark sale of contemporary Chinese art at Sotheby's in 2006.

Speaking from Beijing via a translator, Mr. Xu said "The Living Word" is largely about "the connection between writing and nature." The work begins on the floor, with a dictionary definition for "bird," rendered in a simplified calligraphic script that Mao Zedong made standard in a bid to improve literacy. Higher up, the characters shift to earlier styles, and the work ends with a primitive representation of a bird. "At the top, the colors become quite vivid, and it's almost like the bird is flying out of the window to escape this prison of language," said the artist.

Visitors to the Morgan will be able to watch Mr. Xu and his team install "The Living Word" over four days, starting July 12. The finished piece will be on view through Sept. 15.

Coming up this fall for Mr. Xu is the third part in his Tobacco Project, examining ties between the U.S. tobacco industry and China, at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts in Richmond. And during the 10th anniversary of 9/11, the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council plans to exhibit his "Where Does the Dust Itself Collect?," a 2004 room-size work with a Zen Buddhist poem written into dust from the World Trade Center.