Xu Bing

Xu Bing interviewed by Alan Macfarlane and Li Shuo 28th April 2015

0:04:16 Born in 1955 in Chongqing, Sichuan, China; I never met my grandparents but I saw my grandfather's picture; I went back to my parents home town a number of times and am very interested in this; like your family, my family has a long history, even from the Tang dynasty although no one can guess what my family did in ancient times; my grandfather was a doctor of Chinese medicine in a village; as was usual in a village the patients did not pay in money but in dried meat; my father said that there was a lot of dried meat hanging under the roof in the house; I went back to my home town with my father about thirty years ago and saw the "big character" on the door indicating that it was the house of a respected Chinese doctor; further back, my great great great-grandfather was a Kung Fu master in my parent's home town in Zhejiang, at Wenling near the ocean; before the Tang dynasty my family came from Fujian; one of the family, Xu Luo, held a high government position but then there was turmoil in the government; not wanting to get embroiled he said he was sick, but instead of going home to Fujian he went to Zhejiang and established many famous temples in the Tiantai Mountains there

5:19:23 My father works in the History Department of Peking University and was Head of Department, but he really wanted to be an artist; from his home town he went to Shanghai and studied in the Shanghai Academy of Fine Arts; at that time he was really involved with the underground CCP; this was about 1946; he failed to finish his degree in the academy because of the White Terror, the Kumintang; he left Shanghai and went to Chongqing which is where I was born; my mother works for the Peking University Library, and is Secretary of Teaching; I grew up in a library environment; as a child I loved painting and drawing; I was a shy child and not very healthy, so was often by myself, drawing; I am far-sighted rather than short-sighted

8:53:10 My first school was Peking University Elementary School and progressed through Middle to High School there; in both Middle and High School many of the teachers came from the University; during the right-wing revolutions, because these young people were considered right-wing, they were sent to the schools to be teachers; for them it was sad but lucky for us as they were bright and full of ideas; this was from the end of the 1950s, just before the Great Leap Forward; I remember the suffering when I was first in elementary school in 1959, the time of the great famine; my family was not really affected although I do remember as soon as I got home from school I would go to the kitchen to look for food, but there was nothing; at school I enjoyed physics but not chemistry or mathematics

12:30:06 After High School I went to the countryside for three years; I could have stayed in the city but I wanted to go with my classmate - I was a romantic; we chose to go to a really poor area in the mountains north of Beijing; we worked with the farmers; I can do any work, even ploughing, and really enjoyed it; during the Cultural Revolution my family was in big trouble; my father was one of eight "black" people as he was working in Peking University, always a sensitive political place where movements started; he was working in the history department; that and the philosophy and Chinese language departments were the three most sensitive departments; at that time it was thought that if a father had a bad reputation his children would also be bad; I did get into trouble and felt discriminated against which is why I went to the countryside; living in a village and working with the farmers I felt really good; they did not care about any political background but just saw me as hardworking; they treated us very well; also the countryside was natural with rivers and mountains, and I felt much better than when living in Peking University campus; my father was not allowed to teach and was put into the University gaol; he was then sent away to do hard-labour and there was a lot of criticism of the family

17:31:15 I came back from the countryside to Beijing in 1977 when the Cultural Revolution had ended; as I had worked well in the countryside I had a chance to get into the Central Academy of Fine Arts; I have two brothers and two sisters and I am the middle child with a brother and sister on either side; it is not easy to be in that position in the family, but is a really important position in the countryside as a marriage partner because it shows fecundity and both genders; when a young couple were decorating their wedding room they would invite me as to help them so that I can bring them good luck and children; because of this I learnt a lot about traditional folk art and that has influenced my work; my father went back to his university job after the Cultural Revolution

20:50:13 The Central Academy is the biggest art school in Asia; it was very academic and we were taught by people like Xu Beihong, who had experienced European art and trained us in nineteeth-century art forms - sketching, drawing, really classical which I did very well; on the use of perspective in art, Chinese see this in terms of craft rather than art, which at the highest level must be natural; therefore Chinese art does not move towards realism; the method of brush and scroll came from Chinese philosophy and aimed at the natural; whether your work is interesting or not depends on the first stroke, whether it has a spirit in it, helped by a divine entity rather than human artifice; the beauty of Chinese art in a scroll painting comes from nature; with oil painting, the beauty is in the richness of details, in the layers of paint

26:25:10 Before the Cultural Revolution was the Cold War when the world divided into two parts and there was little communication between them; in the West, in America and Europe they were developing modern art whereas the Socialist part concentrated on realism; in China in art education we thought fine drawing was important but after the Cultural Revolution and the open door policy we then saw modern art; so we started rethinking our art education and art style; to begin with we hated it as limiting; later on, when I went to America I embraced the contemporary art movement; then I saw my own traditional art education as important; Chinese and Western art are really different but they can still find a way to link together; I do lots of contemporary art and I think what really helped me was my own cultural background which gave me a different view point or angle to judge it as international contemporary art is a movement; it is hard to say what I am trying to communicate in my work as the art itself doesn't need words. it can never been explained by language; what I did want was to change people's way of thinking; my art is like a computer virus but is working on the human brain, making trouble for the usual way of thinking; like a computer the brain gets stuck, but then you can restart it and open more space to reorganise the information; I do lots of work that is related to language; for I did a work called 'Square Word Calligraphy'; the words looked very much like Chinese calligraphy which I had learnt to do well from childhood, but this calligraphy was not related to Chinese calligraphy but inside the characters were English; I had combined two totally different writing systems together; it was like an arranged marriage where you don't bother whether you are suitable or not, but just put them together, so the calligraphy looked as though it was wearing a mask, giving it a Chinese face, but behind the mask it was not related at all to China; when you wrote this calligraphy it was really hard to say whether you were writing Chinese or English; looking at that kind of calligraphy you don't have any knowledge to be able to talk about it; we have a concept of what English is and what is Chinese but, but we do not have the knowledge to talk about my calligraphy; this prevents people from using any old concepts and forces them to start again from a very basic level; I am really interested in the way people think

35:11:09 I went to America in 1990 though it was not really related to Tienanmen, but at that time in China the intellectual world and cultural circle was not so interesting; I had a chance to go to Wisconsin-Madison University as an honorary scholar; I found America very different to China; when I had time I went to the University Library and in the basement saw hundreds of computers with students working there; I thought then that American culture was so strong, so powerful, but I don't get a sense of freedom in America; I don't consider the lifestyle is really freedom; you have to pay bills for everything and it interferes with your life; I think capitalism really interferes with natural life; I found the people really friendly and easy; I was impressed by their relationship with birds and small animals; this made me think that the people in America were really nice because the animals were close to them; that is very different from China; I came back to China about eight years ago; I did feel a little strange, but came back because I was invited by the Education Minister to become the Vice-President of the Central Academy of Fine Arts, so was immediately part of the official system; it was a really different lifestyle and way of working than as a free-lance artist working in New York; I came back into an art establishment that had high expectations of me; they expected me to bring back ideas on contemporary art from abroad, but I told them it was the opposite because China was becoming a new country; it was avant-guard and experimental and I wanted to become part of it, absorbing its energy, learning something new; in the way that I had needed America in the 1990s, now I needed to learn new things, living and working in China; now I feel at home in China; I was married but now divorced, and had a daughter in America who is now at a British school in Beijing - Harrow; I couldn't send her to a local school because it would have been too hard for her; I think the British education is good for her as she is used to freedom
42:59:20 Every sphere of human society now is dominated by capitalism, including education and academia, so that the art field is also like this; it is natural and it is not possible to do much about it; it is especially so with contemporary art as people do not have enough knowledge or ideas to talk about it; in the past we had a clearer idea of what is art, but nowadays people don't really understand what it is; in China and elsewhere, nobody can tell us what is good art, so it is hard to value in money-terms but that is also the only way it can be valued, but that is a misunderstanding
47:11:03 If he was on a desert island he would not want any of his past works, but would make new and better art with local materials; even if I was in a really small prison I could also make amazing art as I can find stimulation from even tiny details; my ideas come from everywhere, at any moment; you told us a lot of history about the college and that may give me some idea; even here, a lamp and it's textures may give me an idea; my mind is full of inspirations which I may reject the next day as really stupid, but some ideas may bother me for a long time, and I continue to be excited by them; the longer they stimulate my mind, the more I add to them, and even if I never used them, after a few years I still remember them, and possibly will then finally use them in an art work because they are really valuable and I have to do my best to work with them