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

Xu Bing entered the printmaking department of the Central Academy of Fine Arts, Beijing, in 1977. He had spent the previous three years living and working in a rural people’s commune beyond the Great Wall. The early drawings, woodcuts and etchings shown here depict real places and reflect the Soviet influence in the art instruction he had received.

In the early 1980s, as a teacher at the Central Academy, Xu Bing travelled widely throughout China and continually sketched the landscapes around him. At this period China was opening up to the outside world following the Cultural Revolution (1966-1976). Western art, literature and ideas became readily accessible. Already interested in the possibilities of repetition in printmaking, Xu Bing encountered the works of Andy Warhol and began experimenting in his own art. These works explore the medium of print, yet retain subjects taken from landscape and nature.

Early drawings

French Drawings

In March 1978 the National Gallery of China held an exhibition of French 19th-century rural landscape paintings. The exhibition was organised by the French Ministry of Culture and included works by Millet, Courbet, Corot, Pissarro and others. Xu Bing was then a student at the Central Academy of Fine Arts, very close to the National Gallery, and the exhibition made a deep impression on him. The rural landscapes and farm scenes depicted were reminiscent of his recent experience between 1974 and 1977 as an urban youth sent to the countryside for re-education. The style of the paintings was also familiar. Art instruction in China at that time followed a Soviet model, which was itself based on French Realism.

These drawings from the Ashmolean collection were selected for the present exhibition in conjunction with Xu Bing.

Click here to find out about the influence of socialism on the artist and his work.

Click here to find out about the artist Xu Bing’s connection with the countryside.

Click here to listen to the curator talking about the impact of French landscape painting on the artist.

Sketches and Sketchbooks

The sketches displayed here were drawn in the early 1980s, while Xu Bing was a student and then instructor at the Central Academy of Fine Arts. It was a period when he travelled widely across the country, particularly throughout north China. He sketched constantly. Several of the compositions can be seen in the small woodcut prints (in the next section). Others show methods of representing details of the landscape using simple, repeated forms. This use of his own conventions for plants, stones and other landscape elements anticipates the Repetitions series and Landscripts.

Click here to find out about more about the artist’s sketchbooks while travelling.

Click here to see the artist describing the importance of his travels through China on his landscape work.

Small woodcuts

These woodcuts were produced while Xu Bing was a student at the Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing. Many depict interactions with nature, and capture the simplicity of rural life. The prints also show some of Xu Bing’s explorations of the print medium and his use of Chinese character forms in the compositions.

These prints all depict places in different parts of China that appear in drawings and sketches elsewhere in this gallery.

Click here to listen to the curator talking about the charm of Xu Bing’s woodcut prints.

Landscape Prints

Repetitions series

These prints belong to the multi-part work Five Series of Repetitions. A complete scroll from the series is also displayed here. Though many of the motifs in the prints, and particularly those relating to landscape, appear in Xu Bing’s early drawings and prints their use here is quite different.

Xu Bing has said that the Five Series of Repetitions include much of the groundwork for his Tianshu (Book from the Sky, 1987–91), which he had begun working on at the time some of these individual prints were produced. They mark his move away from the socialist subjects and concerns of his early career, and his move into the world of contemporary art.

Click here to listen to the curator talking about the influence of 1980’s Western art on the artist.