Phoenix (2008-10) is the newest project in New York by the Chinese artist Xu Bing, who previously lived in the city for 18 years before returning to China in 2008. Installed in the nave of Saint John the Divine’s Gothic Revival cathedral, two monumental sculptures, in the form of mythical birds, soar 18 feet above the floor. They are composed entirely of materials and tools from construction sites around Beijing. Xu has explained, in various print and video interviews, that he hit upon the idea after he was commissioned to create a sculpture for the glass atrium of a building in Beijing’s central business district. During his visit to the construction site he witnessed firsthand the harsh working conditions of the migrant laborers and decided to use salvaged building materials to bring attention to them. The developers requested making the sculptures more aesthetically pleasing by encasing them in crystal, but the artist refused. As a result, he lost the commission. Barry Lam, the president of a major computer company in Taiwan, eventually purchased the artworks. Before coming to Saint John the Divine, Phoenix was displayed in the Today Art Museum in Beijing, the Shanghai World Expo 2010 and MassMoCA in North Adams, Massachusetts last year.

At first sight, the massive scale of the two sculptures strikes the viewer with awe, just like the shiny new buildings cropping up around Beijing (and New York). Further examination of Phoenix leads to the discovery that the creatures have been brought to life through dirty, rusty, commonplace items, wielded by laborers toiling in an environment far from shiny or new. As creatures born, according to legend, from the ashes of fire, Xu’s phoenixes stand in for those grand examples of Beijing architecture, and succeed in packing a powerful punch in terms of conveying its message, one of Xu’s strongest political statements to date.

Phoenix is best understood within the theme of metamorphosis, which preoccupied Xu after moving to New York in 1990. In 1997, he invented a new writing system by fusing elements of the English and Chinese languages. Although his words look like Chinese characters, they are comprised of English letters. His audience was invited to learn this “unified” language in an environment resembling a traditional calligraphy classroom, complete with manuals, writing tools and desks. The whole project was entitled New English Square Word Calligraphy. Xu’s Living Word installations (2001-2002), including one exhibited in Washington, D.C., visualized the word “bird” taking flight from floor to ceiling. Each element was either a modern Chinese character, an ancient pictogram, an animal form, or Xu’s own square-word calligraphy. Viewed as a whole, the sculptures evoked the process of morphing from one form to the next. Closest in concept to Phoenix is the artist’s Background Story, an ongoing series begun in 2004. Approaching frosted glass panes, the viewer first sees reprisals of famous classical landscape paintings. Upon coming closer and looking at the verso, one realizes how the brushstrokes are composed of debris both natural and manmade, such as leaves, branches and discarded paper. Background Story masterfully translates, in literal terms, the classical conception of the brushstroke as a representation of the energy and essence of nature and the Universe.

Like Background Story, Phoenix seeks to reveal the humble yet profound origins of creativity, but it does not have Background Story’s transitional stage, facilitated in the latter by the viewer’s movement from the front to the back of the glass panes. The idea of metamorphosis is also not as clear in Phoenix as it was in Living Word. The white lights lining the birds unify the composition, but emphasize stasis. Xu’s idea to imbue his majestic creatures with an element of ugliness is brilliant, and he could have pushed this further. Unfortunately, the choice to install Phoenix within Saint John the Divine further diminishes the impact of its original message by tipping the balance in favor of beauty and grandeur. It also encourages the impression that the sculpted birds are divine. This might induce the viewer to forget about those migrant workers toiling on the ground.

Ultimately, the original site would have been the best place for these sculptures, as they would have reminded visitors of the building’s genesis. On the other hand, temporarily nesting in locations not quite suited to them aptly reflects the plight of Chinese migrant workers, who are forced by poverty to leave the comfort of home for work. Phoenix certainly offers substantial food for thought to make the pilgrimage to Saint John the Divine worthwhile.

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January 9 to February 22, 2014
522 West 19th  Street, between 10th and 11th avenues
New York City, 212-414-1169

This exhibition, itself a product of creative exchange, finds itself in timely dialogue with the Metropolitan Museum’s Ink Art: Past as Present in Contemporary China. Whereas the Met exhibition unabashedly celebrates the ways in which classical Chinese art assimilated modernity and Western art, the show at Chambers suggests a more ambiguous, or conflicted, perspective of this phenomenon.

Guan Shan Gathering features works resulting from the collaboration in 2013 between curator, scholar, and artist Zheng Shengtian and Wang Dongling, the director of the China Academy of Art Modern Calligraphy Research Center, Zhejiang. Zheng asked Wang to inscribe, on two prepared canvases, text taken from the Preface on Landscape Painting by Zong Bing, one of the earliest writings expounding the philosophical concepts of classical landscape painting. One wall displays a video of Wang writing the text, showing the incompatibility of water-based ink and canvas prepared for oil paint. As Wang wrote each character, the surface repelled the ink, making the characters appear disintegrated. The two resulting canvases are displayed on a wall across from the video, showing compositions comprised of ghostly characters.

Guan Shan Gathering was inspired by a project that Zheng created in 2000, entitled Clement Greenberg: Modernist Painting, which is also included in the current exhibition. In it, Zheng’s wife Aikang wrote, again in ink on prepared canvas, a Chinese translation of Greenberg’s canonical essay. Canadian artist Hank Bull can be heard reciting the text in English in the background. As in Guan Shan Gathering, Chinese calligraphy fails to take hold on a surface intended for Western-style painting. In this instance, different from Guan Shan Gathering, the characters dissolve into illegibility. The resulting four canvases are displayed next to the video, showing compositions populated by sporadic black ink dots amidst gray lines.

Clement Greenberg: Modernist Painting is an intriguing visualization of what could happen when one attempts to combine ideas from two artistic traditions. Zheng explained that he chose Greenberg’s essay because it was one of the earliest texts on Western modern art that was translated into Chinese. Greenberg argued that painting needed to assert its “purity” to maintain its relevance and survival. Painting must focus on what was unique to the medium, instead of attempting to be something else, for instance, creating the illusion of three-dimensionality. Zheng’s choice of text is especially fortuitous, because the attempt to transcribe the text in another language, and in a medium combining aspects of Western and Chinese artistic traditions, resulted in works that failed to achieve the goals of either. On the one hand, they are not Chinese calligraphy because Greenberg’s text did not remain intact. On the other hand, the compositions look abstract only by accident and do not aim to assert the primacy of painting’s flat surface. Zheng stated in the exhibition’s catalogue essay that the project resembled “the experience of cultural exchange and misreading.” It is a brilliant reminder, in my opinion, of the complex issues raised by cultural hybridization.

The choice of Preface to Landscape Painting for Guan Shan Gathering simplifies the conceptual premise of the original model, because the text is not in translation, and the subject is itself landscape painting. But this means that the relationship between the content of the text, and the concept of the project, becomes unclear. Furthermore, befitting a true master of calligraphy, Wang Dongling’s spirit prevailed over the resistance of the prepared canvas. His writing remains legible, and the strokes forcefully convey his energy, despite their ghostly appearance. Good calligraphy, in other words, defeated more interesting conceptual intentions.

The exhibition also features a group of paintings by Wang Dongling that show the artist in dialogue with Western abstract art. The medium is traditional ink on paper in hanging scroll format.  At first glance, the compositions of black lines on a white background recall Robert Motherwell’s Elegy to the Spanish Republic series from the 1950s and 1960s. However, Wang’s method of execution springs from a different conceptual platform. As the titles indicate, each composition is composed of two characters, but Wang has obscured them by overlapping what should be distinct strokes. What results are fields of black ink, whose edges breathe with the artist’s energy. Sometimes, one can discern a character within the composition. This method of composing is rooted in the classical tradition of calligraphy. In contrast, Motherwell created his compositions by outlining the shapes first, and then filling them in, a method born from the Western tradition of painting, despite their surface resemblance to Chinese calligraphy. Overall, Wang’s works show how the principles of classical tradition can evolve successfully in a new age.

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