INCHOATE THOUGHTS
July 9, 2011
Xu
Bing, Background Story 7
British
Museum, London, UK
May
12 – July 10, 2011
Enter
the British Museum, turn right, and there, against the deep blue background of the
gallery walls, is a freestanding, sixteen-foot-high screen supporting a Chinese
landscape. The image of steeply receding mountains, forest, and river is
clearly a monochrome brush-and-ink drawing, a monumental hanging scroll. Or is
it? The surface is backlit, so the landscape seems painted not on the side
facing you, but on the reverse of the translucent screen. Or is it? On the left
is a smaller hanging scroll. The landscape is similar. A label tells you that
the scholar-artist Wang Shimin painted it in 1654. Why has Xu Bing reproduced
it?
Venture
round the back and discover the artifice. The light-box, open at the rear, is
edged with fluorescent tubes. A jumble of branches, leaves, twigs, and teased hemp
fiber is stuck to the screen with Scotch tape. Similar, locally gathered
material, together with stubs of colored chalk and rolls of tape, litters the
inside of the bottom of the light-box. Return to the front and disbelievingly
correlate the shriveled vegetation stuck to the screen with the exquisite image
on the front. Xu has recreated Wang’s landscape not in ink, but with the
shadows cast by vegetable fragments stuck to the back of frosted acrylic. Where
twigs and leaves stand out slightly from the surface, the shadows lose depth,
darkness, and clarity. Their penumbrae imitate the delicate wash of diluted
ink. The illusion is intense. Xu has created a contemporary trompe l’oeil that
examines the conditions of representation in the Chinese tradition, yet
participates fully in contemporary Western self-reflectivity.
This
is a work of multiple resonances. What are Wang’s ink and paper but products
derived from the vegetable world, like Xu’s, only more thoroughly processed and
refined? Not before you enter the zone of direct light behind the screen are
you literally enlightened. In front of it, you occupy the Chinese equivalent of
Plato’s Cave, viewing the illusion of a shadow world that you take to be a real
painted representation; yet behind it you see that this apparent reality
comprises shriveled remnants of actuality.
Background Story 7 is the latest in Xu’s series of
scroll recreations using light-and-shadow boxes, his first in vertical format.
The project enacts a peculiarly Chinese procedure of imitation, emulation, and
conversation with older art. In his 1654 hanging scroll landscape, Wang Shimin
had imitated, emulated, and conversed with scroll paintings by Huang Gongwang,
his predecessor by three hundred years. Vice-president of the China Central
Academy of Fine Arts, Beijing, Xu is a government official, as was Wang over
three hundred years previously. As such, Xu is surely aware that the detritus
of reality only finds its representational perfection in the contrivance of
shadows to maintain illusions. In Background
Story 7, as in earlier works in this series executed in China, Korea,
Germany, and the USA, Xu exposes the illusion of perfection to be the
skillfully improvised manipulation of messy reality. As in art, thus in life.