Ashmolean Museum Oxford
by Shelagh Vainker, with essays by Judith Goldman, Peter D. McDonald and Xu Bing
In Landscape/Landscript, the first exhibition and book devoted to his landscape works, Xu Bing addresses the Chinese language through its pictorial qualities and its relationship with landscape painting. He uses Chinese characters to compose mountains, trees, clouds and rivers.
Xu Bing (b.1955) is one of China's most acclaimed living artists, internationally recognised for works that use language to challenge assumptions about culture. This title was published to coincide with an exhibition at the Ashmolean, Landscape/Landscript Nature as Language in the Art of Xu Bing, that ran from 28 February to 19 May 2013.
In new works presented for the first time here he develops the method to make copies of traditional landscape scrolls painted in the Ming dynasty (1368-1644), and so adds a new dimension to the tradition itself. Landscape/Landscript also surveys Xu Bing's landscape work throughout his career and looks beyond China to the rest of the world. As a student and young lecturer he constantly sketched the Chinese landscape using the European styles taught at that time.
More recently, Xu Bing has used landscape to engage with contemporary global issues, in an ongoing educational project that uses landscape painting to develop environmental improvements in Africa, China and South America.
Xu Bing is Vice President of the Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing. Shelagh Vainker is Curator of Chinese Art at the Ashmolean Museum and University Lecturer in Chinese Art. Judith Goldman is a writer and publisher, and previously curator of prints at the Whitney Museum of American Art. Peter D. McDonald is Professor of English and Related Literature at the University of Oxford and a Fellow of St Hugh's College.
© Ashmolean Museum, University of Oxford, 2013.
Paperback
Book contains 204 pages
Dimensions: 28 x 22 x 1.5 cm
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