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

This print belongs to the multi-part work Five Series of Repetitions. A complete scroll from the series (LI2007.63) is displayed in the next gallery. Though many of the motifs in this series of 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), 1987–1991, 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.