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Xu Bing: Word Alchemy assembles more than 50 of Xu Bing’s most important woodcut prints, videos, drawings, installations, and other ephemera representing almost 50 years of the artist’s creative output. Starting with Xu’s early engagements with social realism and Western art historical traditions alike, the exhibition charts the evolution of the artist’s linguistic experiments which challenge and expand not only the history of Chinese landscape painting, but the canons of contemporary art.
Born in China and working in Brooklyn and Beijing, Xu Bing is widely considered one of the most important artists from China in the 20th century. Focusing on the artist’s longstanding engagement with words and language, Word Alchemy is the most comprehensive exhibition on this theme, with around one-third of the objects being shown in the U.S. for the first time. Featured art works include Xu Bing’s early works, never-before-exhibited notebooks, landmark prints, and pieces that include Square Word Calligraphy, the writing system created by the artist to stylize written English as Chinese characters.
