Poetry and Art at the Ashmolean
to celebrate
Xu Bing - an artist of extraordinary character
Performances from
Oxfordshire poets for Saturday 13th April.
Xu Bing is
the first contemporary artist to be shown at the Ashmolean
Museum in Oxford China for
the United States Fukuoka Beijing to become Vice President of China ’s foremost art institution, the Central Academy
I went to his
exhibition to see how he combines poetry with visual art. The exhibition is
called “Landscape Landscript”.
It is radical
indeed to look at poem-pictures through the lens of a character like Xu Bing.
He is a trickster, half comic, half ironic, turning art and nature upside down
and coming up with challenges to our concepts, both east and west. He is a
global character. He offers us “Good Poetry” (see below), on a fridge magnet to
take away from his exhibition. It does not feature on the gallery wall,
however; nor does “Good Painting,” his other fridge magnet. I am inclined to
believe he has created English Chinese characters especially for the
exhibition. Some will choose a pencil or a drawing kit to copy his works.
I offer my
own version of “Good Poetry” below. On Saturday 13th April, you can
hear me read with three other excellent Oxfordshire poets, featuring a series
of poems on the Xu Bing exhibition. These include Dr Jennifer McGowan, who
offers us three poems based on her experience of the exhibition. Her
poems are SŪZHŌU LANDSCRIPT, Life Pond
and Big
River Africa . I also share two other works inspired by the
exhibition. Dr Giles Watson’s landscape poem, “A study in March.” completes our
set of gallery performances for April.
There are two
sets of readings: 12.30-13.30 and 14.30
15.30.
The tours
start in the foyer of the museum.
I felt almost
overwhelmed at the start of the exhibition. How could a poet with no academic
pedigree, or knowledge of Chinese begin to grasp the complexity of Chinese
writing culture? I had been inspired to visit by looking on-line at the awesome
visual feast of his use of a piece of western prose about a still lake which makes a sea of words across the ceiling, pouring
down a stalactite to the floor. The Ashmolean has nothing to compare with this.
It is focused on a historical perspective, and the fact that the Bodleian has a
huge collection of Chinese manuscripts.
The
exhibition takes us on a journey through Xu Bing’s life from his early work,
which is western representational art of good quality, through to his latest
project in conceptual and ecological art and poetry with children in the
forest. His father was denounced during the Cultural Revolution and he was sent
away to a mountainous province far from the cultural centres of China
He challenges
us. There is no plagiarism in Chinese art. Copying the masters of the past makes
things perfect. He explores in so many different ways the interactions that are
possible between words and the world of art.
One of his
solutions is to create characters which mimic the form of tree or mountain. We
see these characters patterned on to landscapes of mountains in a way that is
at once traditionally Chinese and at the same time radically new. He goes on to
create a whole new world of nonsense characters which are somehow still
Chinese.
At the end of
the exhibition he shares his forest project, which is ignored by most of the
reviews I have seen. For me it is the most exciting part of the exhibition.
When I was
writing my manifesto on poem-picture making, I wrote:
“From the earliest days of printing, a world
of visual images with associated thought and feeling, juxtaposed with text has
been part of the western way of enculturation, to help in the process of
translating meaningless ciphers, squiggles on a page, into the stuff of inner
experience, into understood written words, leaping from the page or screen into
constructs of a mental world.
I
will never forget the moment when words and images entwined and danced for me
as I began to understand written text for the first time. It was like the
moment when stumbling and sinking transform into skiing and swimming as
learning transforms to achieving.”
Xu Bing has created his own wall art from
the pictures of seven year olds in Africa and Asia, who add their first pieces
of writing on to their pictures of a tree or trees. This is that wonderful
moment when words, world and art all combine in the creativity that makes us
human. He then auctions their art on-line to earn money to buy more trees for
the forest. The children’s own works sit on the edge of the exhibition just
round the corner from his fridge magnets. Xu Bing suggests each tree has a
child’s secret soul inside it.
Who creates the art we choose to watch? Xu
Bing says he copies the children’s trees very carefully. We would be asked to
pay much more for the work of the famous artist than for the work of the seven
year old children, though.
I am delighted to see English script and
English words on the children’s paintings. Xu Bing truly brings East and West
together into a new global conceptual world of creativity. He plays with us. He
also laughs at us, benignly.
Nick Owen
I find good poetry
GOOD POETRY
 |
The Xu Bing
exhibition
Good characters
Never make
plagiarism
In Chinese art
Repetition
Of a master stroke
Imprints the soul
Can a westerner
Find lines of
poetry
In the branches of
a tree
Matrika Shakti
The word made flesh
Becomes a poem on
the page
Art goes global
Text blends into
landscape
Culture transcends
image-in-nation
© Nick Owen 2013-03-15
Some further comment on the exhibition taken from other reviewers
"As a Chinese artist, Xu Bing has focused particularly on the pictorial quality of the Chinese language which, he maintains, lies at the core of Chinese culture. His Landscript series uses Chinese characters for landscape features to compose landscape paintings which have the appearance of traditional Chinese landscapes, as developed since the Song dynasty (960–1279). In this way, characters for ‘stone’ make up an image of rocks; the character for ‘tree’ makes up trees; and ‘grass’ for grass and so on. Xu Bing has produced four new pieces for this exhibition which develop further his technique of using characters as brushwork. from "Artlyst""
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/2/86f48960-9ac1-11e2-97ad-00144feabdc0.html#axzz2Plgrdxm7
http://www.oxfordtimes.co.uk/leisure/art/10270287.Xu_Bing__Ashmolean_Museum/
http://en.cafa.com.cn/nature-as-language-interview-with-xu-bing-on-the-occasion-of-landscape-landscript-presented-by-the-ashmolean-museum-uk.html
The posters were shrill and angry, denouncing people by name, and accusing the targets of being "capitalist roaders." Xu's father, like many other intellectuals, saw his own name appear. "At that time, you really felt the power of words," Xu says. "If you wanted to kill somebody, you did it not by gun but by brush."
In a cruel twist of fate, Xu, because of his excellent writing skills, was chosen by his school to create propaganda posters similar to the ones that condemned his father. It was an experience that gave the student a sense of the darker aspsect of writing and words. His eye for balance and structure in composing Chinese calligraphy was now put into the service of something dangerous and alienating. This was a theme that would resonate clearly in his later works, including Book From the Sky, a work that's disturbing, says Perry Link, because Xu "suggests that austere writing might be a fraud, [subverting] value as much as fact."
For an artist whose tumultuous past could have easily been embittering, Xu regards his history--China's history--as something that has allowed him to forge a new path, separate from the East and the West. Leon Wender, owner of the China 2000 Fine Art gallery, has sold Xu's work in recent years; he says, "Xu doesn't need to do a twist on somebody else's work. He figured out something all by himself. He's on his own. And nobody can copy him." And Xu reflects by saying: "When I was living in the countryside, [my contemporaries from Hong Kong and Taiwan] were at Yale, or in London, in some art school, listening to a contemporary art lecture. But the problem is they just treat art in too formal a way. I treat it in a wild way, not in a fixed way. This is good--you can bring something special, something new into contemporary art. If you can find a correct way to face your background, your tradition, maybe you can change that background in a good way." Xu has not only changed the background, he has given the future a new voice and a new language.
http://www.xubing.com/index.php/site/texts/being_and_nothingness/
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