Artist creates work in his own language

“My English [is] not very good,” Chinese-born artist Xu Bing told an audience in the Frick… “My English [is] not very good,” Chinese-born artist Xu Bing told an audience in the Frick Fine Arts Building yesterday.

“Plus I am tired and jet-lagged,” Xu added. “But I have good work and I hope my work will speak for itself.”

Xu used a QuickTime presentation and his choppy English to display his unusual body of work, work that has brought him worldwide acclaim and earned the 39-year-old print-maker and conceptional artist a MacArthur Foundation “genius award” — despite, or perhaps because of, its atypical uses of word carvings, tobacco leaves and live pigs.

In the 1970s, Xu attended Beijing’s traditionally minded Central Academy of Fine Art. After graduation, he spent several years living with poor farmers and painting rural life, as was required of artists during China’s Cultural Revolution.

But Xu soon grew tired of China’s stringent ideas about what constitutes worthwhile art. He relocated to New York City in 1987, where he began his first conceptional piece. He created his own 4,000-character language, scratched out on wooden sheets in his apartment, during a span of four years.

Xu said that most Westerners mistook his characters for Chinese writing, while Koreans mistook them for Japanese writing and Japanese people mistook them for Korean.

Chinese people were simply baffled, he said.

After the project was complete (and deemed genius by some New York art critics), Xu continued to experiment with Chinese-looking characters, and the reaction they garnered from Westerners.

He created calligraphy that resembled Chinese writing but was actually English. He set up workshops in New York museums, where visitors could create their own similar calligraphy.

He also helped develop a computer program that turns English writing into Chinese-looking calligraphy. With Xu’s consent, computer programmers also developed Spanish and German versions of the program.

Xu’s conceptional artwork has also included experiments with wild animals. For one exhibit, shown in an underground Beijing museum in 1995, he tattooed two New Hampshire pigs with Chinese and English writing. The pigs, oblivious to their participation in a piece of conceptional art, began copulating, much to the audience’s amusement.

Another conceptional piece utilized tobacco beetles. During a stay at the art department at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina, Xu created large books made from tobacco leaves, which detailed how the tobacco industry helped build the university.

Xu allowed a swarm of tobacco beetles into the exhibit. They laid eggs in his books and, as Xu had planned, the eggs hatched, destroying the books during the last days of the exhibit.

But not all of Xu’s work is so light-hearted. Recently, he has won praise for a work reflecting on the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks.

Xu collected dust from the remains of the World Trade Center and, three years after the attack, took it to an art gallery in Wales.

Xu carved a famous expression from a 17th century Chinese monk on the gallery’s floor and filled the carvings with the dust.

The phrase read, “As there is nothing from the first, where does the dust collect itself?”

The piece, entitled “Where Does the Dust Collect Itself?” won the prestigious Artes Mundi Visual Arts Prize last year.