Explore the innovative landscape work of one of China’s most renowned contemporary artists.
Xu Bing was born in Chongqing in 1955 and grew up in Beijing where both his parents worked at Peking University. In 2008 he returned there after nearly twenty years in the United States to become Vice President of China’s Central Academy of Fine Arts, where he himself trained in the late 1970s.
He has exhibited across Asia, the US, Europe and Australia, and much of his work deals with the connections between different cultures. He explores these through language and particularly through re-inventing scripts. In this exhibition Xu Bing takes the pictorial qualities of the Chinese written language to create a new painting method. His new works comment on the Chinese landscape painting tradition and on the Chinese relationship with nature.
Xu Bing’s landscapes also show connections between China and other cultures. The first gallery exhibits drawings and prints that reflect different stages in China’s engagement with the West. The second displays his Landscripts while the third gallery shows Xu Bing’s dedication to teaching and to using landscape art to improve global environmental awareness.
Eastern Art Online presents an online version of Xu Bing: Landscape Landscript to provide a taste of the exhibition on display in the Ashmolean's Special Exhibitions Galleries. It enables visitors to browse and search all exhibition objects and their high-quality zoomable images online. It also links through to multimedia content that has been created especially for the show that features behind-the-scenes footage, artist interviews, curator podcasts, and other information and activities. A fully illustrated catalogue of the exhibition is also available to purchase from the exhibition shop, or online here. All text from the exhibition is also available in Chinese here.
Click here to listen to the Curator of Chinese Art, Shelagh Vainker, talk about how the exhibition came about.
Click here to view behind-the-scenes photos from the installation of the exhibition.
Objects from past exhibitions may have now returned to our stores or a lender. Click into an individual object record to confirm whether or not an object is currently on display. Our object location data is usually updated on a monthly basis, so please contact the Jameel Study Centre if you are planning to visit the museum to see a particular Eastern Art object.
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