ABSTRACT
Xu Bing’s installation and video developed in the wake of the ‘New Wave’ of Chinese experimental art and performance which appeared as part of a growing political optimism and debate emerging in China from 1985 to 1986. After graduating from the Beijing Central Academy of Fine Arts in 1987, and while lecturing at the academy in 1988 and 1989, Xu Bing created and exhibited his installation A Book from the Sky amid a resurgence of this spirit of experimentation and creativity. In April 1989, students began demonstrating for reform and democracy. By the end of May, the demonstrations, focused upon the intensely politically significant site of Tien An Men Square, had come to include workers and farmers, while the numbers of protesters in Beijing alone exceeded one million. In June, the People’s Liberation Army entered the square, opening fire on the protesters. This was followed in August by the authorities’ widespread confiscation of more than 12 million publications and videotapes in an effort to crack down on dissent. In this atmosphere, A Book from the Sky was attacked ‘as standing for all the bourgeois liberal tendencies’* of the new arts movement. In 1990, Xu Bing visited the United States at the invitation of the University of Wisconsin, where he was made an Honorary Fellow. Although he exhibits his work in China, Japan and throughout the West, Xu Bing is now resident in New York. A Book from the Sky, A Case Study of Transference (on video) and the classroom installation Square Words: New English Calligraphy were shown at the Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA), London, in May 1997, as part of a season of work by contemporary artists from across the Chinese diaspora. This conversation took place at the ICA in May 1997.
