Eastern Art Online, Yousef Jameel Centre for Islamic and Asian Art

Ashmolean − Eastern Art Online, Yousef Jameel Centre for Islamic and Asian Art

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Series of Repetitions: Ziliudi

  • loan
  • Description

    Xu Bing’s Repetitions series explores and exposes the processes of woodblock printing. The scroll has been printed eleven times in sequence from a single block at different stages in its carving. It is part of a series of works that represent Xu Bing’s first contemporary pieces in that they engage with modern art beyond his own local sphere, both technically and conceptually. The title Ziliudi, ‘family plots’, refers to a landownership arrangement instituted in the 1950s whereby families who worked on state-owned communes were allowed an individual plot whose produce they could retain for private consumption or sale. The plants depicted in the central sections are standardised and arranged as blocks of text, connecting the work to both nature and language.

  • Details

    Series
    Five Series of Repetitions
    Associated place
    AsiaChinaHebei province Beijing (place of creation)
    Date
    1987
    Artist/maker
    Xu Bing (born 1955) (printmaker)
    Material and technique
    waste-block woodcut; pencil inscription
    Dimensions
    54.5 x 864 cm (height x width)
    Material index
    Technique index
    Object type index
    No. of items
    1
    Credit line
    Lent by Xu Bing's Studio.
    Accession no.
    LI2007.63
  • Further reading

    Oxford: Ashmolean Museum, 28 February-19 May 2013, Xu Bing Landscape/Landscript: Nature as Language in the Art of Xu Bing, Shelagh Vainker, ed. (Oxford: Ashmolean Museum, 2013), no. 71 on pp. 110-111, pp. 22, 24, 25, 36, 77, 86, 100, illus. pp. 110-113 fig. 71

Glossary

waste-block

  • waste-block

    Waste-block, or lost-block printing, requires one block, which is gradually cut between prints to build up the layers of the image. When the image is complete, the block has little printing surface remaining.

Past Exhibition

see (1)

Location

    • returned to owner

Objects are sometimes moved to a different location. Our object location data is usually updated on a monthly basis. Contact the Jameel Study Centre if you are planning to visit the museum to see a particular object on display, or would like to arrange an appointment to see an object in our reserve collections.

 

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