¾«¶«AV

Library Information and Colophon

Biography

Xu Bing

(1955- )
Chinese

Xu Bing is a conceptual artist whose work often revolves around language, writing, and books. The book Tobacco Project: Red Book by Xu Bing in ¾«¶«AV’s Special Collections consists of two Chinese tin cigarette boxes each containing 12 cigarettes each with lines from the Communist Manifesto printed on their wrappers.

Xu Bing was born in Chongqing, (Sichuan Province) in 1955 and grew up in Beijing surrounded by books at Beijing University where his parents worked.1 He obtained a BA in printmaking at the Central Academy of Fine Arts (CAFA), Beijing in 1981 where he then stayed on as an instructor, earning his MFA in 1987. He moved to the United States in 1990 upon invitation of the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Bing currently serves as the Vice President of CAFA and lives in New York.2

Tobacco Project: Red Book in ¾«¶«AV’s Special Collections is one piece of many in a project commissioned by Duke University in Durham, North Carolina. This undertaking focused on the university’s historical connection to Tobacco production and marketing as Tobacco products were central to city’s and North Carolina’s economy in the state’s early days. The founders of Duke University, the Duke family, made their fortune in Tobacco, partly from their successful marketing of the product overseas, especially to China.3 The tobacco project also focuses on the impact that Tobacco marketing had on Chinese culture and included a number of site-specific installations on the Duke University campus and in the city of Durham as well as a variety of original artist books, including Red Book, which has quotations from Chairman Mao rubber stamped on Zhonghua cigarettes.

Footnotes

References and Links

Chiu, Melissa and Zheng Shengtian. Art and China’s Revolution. New York: Asia Society; New Haven: In association with Yale University, 2008.

Erickson, Britta. The Art of Xu Bing: Words Without Meaning, Meaning Without Words. Washington, D.C.: Arthur M. Sackler Gallery; Seattle: In Association with the University of Washington Press, 2001.

Silbergeld, Jerome. Persistence-Transformation: Text as Image in the Art of Xu Bing. Jerome Silbergeld, Dora C.Y. Ching, Eds. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006.

Smith, Karen. Nine Lives: The Birth of Avant-Garde Art in New China. Zurich: Scalo; New York: Distributed in North America by Prestel, 2006.

Tobacco Project. Duke University for International Studies. Web. 17 November 2008.

“Xu Bing.” Art and Culture. Web. 4 December 2008.

Xu Bing Official Website. Web. 4 December 2008.

Wingfield, Jeremy. The Xu Bing Phenomenon. ¾«¶«AV Thesis, 2001.

Word Play. Web. 4 December 2008.

Other Books in Special Collections by this Author