Xu Bing at the Sackler - Washington, D.C - Brief Article

This carefully curated show was the Sackler Gallery's first major exhibition of contemporary art, as well as Xu Bing's first high-profile solo museum show. The exhibition, titled "Word Play," presented several new site-specific pieces as well as a sampling of recently refined earlier works, many of which were enhanced by items in the museum's collection. Throughout, Xu Bing lifted language from the page and treated it as malleable sculptural material.

A sculpture titled Monkeys Grasp for the Moon hung from the Sackler's atrium skylight through the main stairwell to a small pool five levels down. The piece consisted of 20 versions of the word "monkey" carved in fiberglass. These 2-foot-long sculpted words, which ranged from Arabic to German, also resembled monkeys, stretched at beginning and end to form long tails and arms with which they were linked together. Xu's inspiration was an ancient folktale about some monkeys who try to capture the moon's reflection in a pool of water. Joining tails and arms to forma chain, they reach the pool only to lose the reflection at the very moment they attempt to grasp it. The piece not only indexed the illusory nature of language--ceci n'est pas un singe--but it also embraced the dilemma as a universal condition.

Gracefully poised at the entrance to the exhibition proper was The Living Word, a cluster of carved acrylic pieces that, though hanging from the ceiling, appeared to leap off the floor. The pieces were different historical versions of the Chinese character for bird. The modern character and dictionary definition of bird, also rendered in carved acrylic, were laid out flat to form the base of the work. As the piece's elements rose and changed colors, they were gradually transformed into the word's earliest pictographic form and therefore most akin to the image of a bird itself. At the installation's pinnacle, bird as a visual entity was revealed complete with wings and beak. This simple, beautiful deconstruction of a word brilliantly turned language against itself.

Xu's affinity with classical forms was evident throughout the show. "Landscript," a series of three large-scale ink works, are landscapes constructed of scripted characters. The Chinese characters for mountain, rock and rain rhythmically traverse the paper to create an impression of a faraway vista. These epic works fuse the traditions of calligraphy with Chinese landscape painting to suggest that human interaction with nature is always mediated by language. In Reading Landscape: After Yuan Jiang, Xu extended a Qing dynasty landscape painting borrowed from the Sackler collection past its picture frame. The scene beyond Yuan Jiang's original cropping was imagined through bright character figurines. Carved in acrylic and wood, the exaggerated pictograph forms for cloud, river and forest curved down the wall and sprawled out onto the floor, countering the archaic dinginess of the painting with vibrant animated quirkiness.

For both Xu Bing and the Sackler, this exhibition marked an enlivening departure from the past that will hopefully chart the future for some time to come.

COPYRIGHT 2002 Brant Publications, Inc.
COPYRIGHT 2002 Gale Group