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

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.