Xu Bing and Contemporary Chinese Art: Cultural and Philosophical Reflections

5. The Living Word: Xu Bing and the Art of Chan Wordplay

117 chapter five The Living Word Xu Bing and the Art of Chan Wordplay a pr i l l i u Since emigrating from China to the United States in 1990, Xu Bing has developed a unique format of art connected to his position as an artist of the Chinese diaspora. Featured in prestigious exhibitions around the world, his work has received critical acclaim across Asia, Australia, Europe, and North America. As for many Chinese artists who moved abroad after the 1989 Tiananmen Square demonstrations, Xu Bing’s use of “traditional” Chinese cultural elements has become a particularly problematic topic of discussion . In a highly competitive contemporary art market, artists of the diaspora are often criticized for self-exoticizing their works by using “traditional” themes and media. At the same time, they are accused of borrowing too much from the “West,” to the extent of having lost touch with their native cultures.1 Perpetually framed by such debates around cultural identity and authenticity, diasporic artists face significant challenges in creating works that transcend these predetermined categories. Xu Bing is particularly skilled in dealing with this double bind. Keeping his foreign audience in mind, his strategies for introducing “traditional” Chinese elements are cleverly combined with a deconstruction of basic cultural categories. Inspired by Chan Buddhist philosophy, Xu Bing’s influential works have dealt with the liminology of language and an evocation of what Chan masters call “living words” (shengyu 生语), including nonsensical, paradoxical, or tautological wordplay. These themes allow the artist to access and perform “tradition” while simultaneously denying its fixed 118 a pr il liu identity and meaning. Starting with his earliest works as a studio art student in China (Five Series of Repetition, 1987) and continuing through to his recent installations in Europe and North America (Where Does the Dust Itself Collect?, 2004), Xu Bing’s interest in Chan is enacted at the level of process and experimentation. However, the majority of critical texts concerning his work only give brief mention to this salient theme. Existing critiques have addressed his interest in language from the perspective of cultural identity, ideology, and postmodern discourses of Euro-American academia.2 By drawing connections between Chan texts and Xu Bing’s art, I intend to map out an alternative reading of his interest in language and wordplay. A close examination of several key works will illustrate the rich diversity of Chan linguistic strategies that have inspired Xu Bing’s art. Before setting out on this project, it is important to keep in mind Xu Bing’s intention behind accessing a Chinese cultural discourse , which is to speak to a larger audience. Xu Bing has stated, “I have no choice but to draw from my own cultural tradition, which has been filtered by Mao’s Cultural Revolution. I feel that to use Chinese cultural elements to address global issues, to participate in global cultural debates, is a positive development . . . the real problem is not what materials or cultural elements one uses, but the level of one’s reflection.”3 By citing the Cultural Revolution, Xu Bing reminds audiences of the disorienting ideological campaigns that have challenged the very foundations of traditional culture in his generation. For Xu Bing, the nebulous concept of “traditional culture ” is thus less important than an artwork’s potential for engaging in global dialogue. These statements reflect his desire to transcend his local context to speak to a larger, global community. This is a challenging task since non-Western artists participating in such “global dialogue” are often denied the global perspective, whereas “Western artists must always transcend their particular context and be representative of a universal perspective. The same status of universality is not extended globally.”4 In a statement that encapsulates a unique dilemma of Chinese diaspora artists, Gu Wenda has pointed out the cultural misreadings of their works: Artists like Xu Bing and I use Chinese elements, but not in a traditional way. This is difficult for non-Chinese audiences unfamiliar with Chinese culture to understand. They think we are The Living Word 119 using traditional Chinese elements when we are not. At the same time, conservative Chinese intellectuals criticize us for revisionism . This is a dilemma we face because of the isolation and the ensuing level of incomprehension between different cultures.5 The problematic positioning of diasporic artists, displaced from conventional categories, yet caught between the presumed access/ denial of their...