Curated by Philip Tinari and Feng Boyi

Although Xu Bing’s conceptualism has succeeded in brewing controversy domestically and abroad (recall the removal of his A Case Study of Transference, 1994, from “Art and China After 1989” at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York last year), he stands out among contemporary artists as a respected educator and pedagogue within the Chinese academy. This exhibition will present a career-spanning selection of Xu’s art, from his breakout 1989 woodblock-print installation, Book from the Sky, to his 2017 feature-length film Dragonfly Eyes, to brand-new works. This comprehensive show—catalogue included—will parse Xu’s unique legacy for traces of an overarching methodology and will examine his practice within the complicated and fickle Chinese sociopolitical context. Both the artist and his environmental circumstances are characterized by a willingness to not only sponge visuals from traditional culture but also to utilize primal forces, disjuncture, and assiduous manual labor.

— Lee Ambrozy