EXHIBITED:

Joe Martin Hill curated, Metamorphosis: The Generation of Transformation in Chinese Contemporary Art, Tampere Art Museum, Tampere, Finland, June 2007

Jason Chia Chi Wang curated, Form, Idea, Essence and Rhythm: Contemporary East Asian Ink Painting, Taipei Fine Arts Museum, Taipei, October 4-December 28, 2008

Xu Bing was born in Chongqing and raised in Beijing. He was sent down to the countryside in the last two years of the Cultural Revolution. Upon returning to Beijing, he tested into the China Central Academy of Fine Art Printing Department, where he earned a master's degree. He travelled to the United States in 1990, living in Brooklyn and engaging with artists Ai Weiwei and Tehching Hsieh. He won the MacArthur Foundation Genius Award in 1999 for his work as an artist. The foundation praised "his originality, creativity and capacity to contribute importantly to society."

Xu Bing's "A Book from the Sky" was created while he was in the countryside during the Cultural Revolution. Xu spent three years carving out roughly 4,000 Chinese characters by hand. None of the characters repeated, and none of them could be found in the dictionary. "A Book from the Sky" was later exhibited at the National Art Museum of China in the form of long printed sheets of scroll paper hanging from the ceiling. The work was also printed as a four volume book bound in the ancient style, with a total of 100 sets that are currently held in museums, foundations and private collections.

In the 1990s, Xu Bing created "New English Calligraphy" in New York, which used Chinese calligraphy techniques to write English words. English speakers could quickly learn how to apply this writing style to read Chinese style characters with English techniques. Each character formed a square, called Square Words. For Chinese speakers, these words "appeared to be Chinese characters, but were indecipherable." In 2004, his work "Where does the Dust Itself Collect?", made from the ashes of the World Trade Center after the 9/11 attacks, won the Artes Mundi Award. The Turner Prize is only open to British artists, but the Artes Mundi Award is designated for non-British artists, and Xu Bing was the first recipient.

Xu Bing's "Landscript" began in 1999 as a landscape study in Nepal. Created using countless Chinese ideographs, this landscape gives the feeling of a mountain rising out of the details, a unique landscape reading experience. This 2007 "Landscript" piece was created for the Tampere Art Museum in Finland. It was selected for the "Chinese Contemporary Exhibition," curated by American curator Joe Martin Hill, which opened in June 2007. It was also featured in the 2008 exhibition "Form, Idea, Essence and Rhythm: Contemporary East Asian Ink Painting," curated by Jason Chia Chi Wang and held at the Taipei Fine Arts Museum.