AAP 110 REVIEWS 2018 August/Sept e mber CITY: Beijing GALLERY: UCCA IN BOX: Xu Bing UNDER BOX: Thought and Method AUTHOR: Tom Mouna A pioneering contemporary artist — with “ Chinese ” prefixed or not — Xu Bing needs little introduction, making him a more than suitable subject for what was essentially the comeback - blockbuster show of Beijing’s U llens Cent e r for Contemporary Art after it had been semi - refurbished and acquired by new owners. Simply, t he task for an exhibition of an artist of this stature is to add to un derstandings of the ir practice and to demonstrate that they are worthy of their footing A logical route towards this is a large - scale career survey , as was set out in “Thought and Method,” a disjoi nted ly chronological display , which beg an and end ed with the same work, Xu’s magnum opus, Book from the Sky (1987 – 1991 ) R eams of hanging scrolls, weighty tomes placed on the ground and an overwhelming abundance of purposefully illegible Chinese characters print ed on both, gave the installation a formidable presence — a feeling that aligned with Xu ’s skeptical reference to imposing post - Reform Chinese thinkers who argued that traditional Chinese culture was deteriorating: signifiers were losing their referents. On entering the Great Hall , there were tens of pencil drawings, etchings and woodblock prints from the 1980s. The drawings struck as dour studies of light and shading , with the woodbloc k prints st anding out Five Series of Repetitions: Field (1987), a seven - meter - plus printed scroll , mov es sequentially from a square of dark ink produced by an uncut wooden block, through images of tadpole - like forms and crop fields before culminating in almost total whiteness , demonstrat ing Xu’s scrutiny of the repetition that he understood as defining printmaking. That printmaking and deep , extended stud ies of his particular focuses distinguish Xu’s practice w as already clear at this point of the exhibition Nearby was Ghosts Pounding the Wall (1990 – 91) , an installation that resulted from Xu’s month - long process of creating prints from the surfaces of the Great Wall , which hung monumental ly like the W all itself The significance of the work’s depiction of an iconic Chinese monument deepens on learning that it was first ex hibited in the United States , where Xu moved in 1990 and stayed for almost two decades W ith much of his works including , to varying degrees , stereotype s of China — hanzi characters, cigarettes, pigs, shan shui painting — it’s apparent how Xu addressed non - Chinese audiences. Yet , this connects to something that the exhibition was emphatic about , namely Xu’s investigation into degrees of hybridity across cultures. The well - known performance , A Case Study in Transference (1994) , was representative of this. At the show, a n open - top cage filled with books and two television screens show ed the original p erformance with two pigs copulating , one inked with imagined Chinese hanzi and the other with invente d English words This was an actua lization of Xu’s critical perception that in 1990s post - Reform Chin a artists were too eager to draw from freshly arriving Western sources. Xu’s career was also shown to be remarkable for the pace with which he transformed his materials and visual language to keep pace with socio - cultural and technological shifts , as demonstrated by Book from the Ground (2003 – ), a novel Xu scribed with self - composed , purportedly universally understandable emoticons and symbols T he years of study and experimentation Xu engaged in for the novel were presented as desks strewn with note books, papers and computers , as well as walls covered with notes and images. Forest Project ( 2008 – ) , a series of educational workshops that sees Xu attempting to use art to foster demonstrable , chiefly ecological change , was exhibited as wooden walls with landscape drawings and documentary photographs and videos that formed a construction around a tree . The project was unique in the show for its practical humanitarian focus That the majority of the exhibition ’s other work s did not demonstrate such blatant ly visible and direct aff e cts b y no means eliminated the possibility of them doing so Instead , “ Thought and Method ” made clear that Xu has had an inalienable impact on contemporary art and its most advanced trajectories , as well as, more generally , our understandings of multifarious culture s and their inter relations , not least of all China and the West.