The facts of Xu's life are less dramatic and stereotypical, more politically ambiguous. Born in 1955, Xu Bing learned calligraphy from his father and printmaking at the Beijing Academy of Fine Arts. He was sent to the countryside to be re-educated, as were millions of other students at the time, and he has no bitterness about the experience. Xu Bing did create, with other artists, a poster called "The People Are with the Students" just days before the June 4, 1989, massacre. His first large piece, A Book from the Sky, shown in Beijing in 1988, did come under criticism from the government after Tiananmen, having previously been nearly universally received as important, intelligent, painstakingly produced, and beautiful. The piece consisted of dozens of reproductions of the same book using traditional (meaning pre-Mao) binding, strings, carved pearwood stamps, and typesetting. Long, billowy banners with traditional, calligraphic script running down them hung above the books, which were flanked by wall texts, a typical method for expressing dissent. But what earned him a reputation among the late-eighties avant-garde intelligentsia in Beijing was that none of the four thousand or so characters on the books, banners, and walls was comprehensible. The artist had created them himself, having spent the prior year inside his apartment devising an unreadable language and carving it on woodblocks.

After the Tiananmen Square massacre, Xu was labeled "bad" by conservative artists and the government, who feared that his illegible work concealed subversive meanings. The same government that had demanded that artists not say too much was now, ironically, turning on one for saying nothing at all. Being "bad," however, had no concrete repercussions. Xu was watched but not silenced or repressed in any way we might expect. It was, as he put it, simply not a good atmosphere for making art. In 1990, Xu was invited by the University of Wisconsin to be a visiting artist in residence. He accepted, and has lived in the United States ever since.

THAT SO MANY Western commentators want to see Xu as a symbol of recent politics in China is not entirely surprising, or even reprehensible. But it is only somewhat accurate, and seems more significantly to reveal certain reductive tendencies regarding the Western reception of Chinese culture. "That's a problem with Xu Bing's works," says Britta Erickson, an art historian who has written several monographs and catalogs about Xu over the past ten years. "People project their own ideas onto them. The pieces gather up more and more meaning." And as Jianying Zha points out in her influential book China Pop, even contemporary China itself can be a canvas for the often distorted desires of those looking at it. "There are many clichés about China," she writes. "Often, they circulate with the aid of famous icons: the Great Wall, the Chinese box, Mao, the smiling panda. The latest is Tiananmen Square." Xu himself, however, encourages and even delights in multiple readings.

Xu Bing A Case Study of Transference Performance/Installation- two live breeding pigs with text Han Mo Art Center, Beijing, China 1993-4 Courtesy of the artist.

Speaking with Xu, it becomes clear that he understands the power of ambiguity. He states that he deliberately keeps the meanings of his pieces open-ended. "The reason why people have so many reactions to A Book from the Sky is because I didn't say anything," he says. In addition to making characters that did not parse, Xu used a common, standard script that he describes as "very basic and personality-less." Xu is almost as inscrutable, absorbed more by books about ancient Chinese scripts than musings about today's art world. His often elliptical pronouncements can sound deliberately disingenuous on the page. In person, though, he utters statements like "Working with animals and text offer different difficulties, but I like difficult things" with casual sincerity. Dressed simply in jeans and a T-shirt, the nondress of the nonideological artist, with glasses and tousled, chin-length hair flying away from his face, Xu might be mistaken for the Chinese John Lennon if he weren't so completely unassuming and attentive to everything but his own persona. But in discussing the events surrounding Tiananmen, Xu's shoulders hunch up despite himself, betraying rare discomfort and emotion.

Upon leaving Beijing for Wisconsin, Xu created Ghosts Pounding the Wall (1990). While still in China, he had recruited fifteen farmers and students to make ink-on-paper rubbings of the Great Wall. in Madison, he reinforced the rubbings with stronger paper, then, in the final piece, as with A Book from the Sky, draped them from the ceiling to pour down over the floor. At the base was a pile of dirt. Xu has said that this piece was partly about Tiananmen, among other things. With Ghosts, says the artist, he realized that traditional woodblock printmaking could be performed using any surface with relief. The process of rubbing was also formally interesting to Xu, since "the paper comes so close to the original object. The relationship of touch there -- it's like the difference between seeing someone's photograph and being able to shake their hand or hug them," he says, explaining his growing fascination with tactility, responsiveness, and, in the language of contemporary criticism, the indexical trace of the hand. "Other methods of recording, like photographs or film, are more like a shadow." In the metaphor for touch, Xu provides, albeit unwittingly, one reading of the piece: a memorial to the dead that substitutes the rubbings for the feel of their bodies.

ON THE SURFACE, it appears that Xu Bing is addressing many of the expected themes of postmodernism: the erasure of meaning, the exploration of notions of the body, tampering with authenticity, highlighting the "trace" of the real. But Xu's ideology, if he has one, is less concerned with simulacra, absences, and palimpsests than with something that is rarely associated with contemporary art: being friendly. "When an audience sees a piece they don't understand, they think that they have a problem, that they need more education. But actually contemporary art has a big problem, then," comments Xu. His solution is to make viewers feel at ease, engaged, while at the same time placing before them something deeply strange and ontologically challenging.

Introduction to a New English Calligraphy (1994-6), which was exhibited at the New Museum last year, invites visitors to sit down and try their hand at what appears to be Chinese calligraphy. As they put ink to paper and begin to copy his examples, they suddenly recognize that English characters are forming, that they are writing out nursery rhymes or common last names. Xu, who again spent many months creating a new script, this time more or less legible, describes the characters as English forms wearing Chinese masks. Though some might see this as a metaphorical statement on cross-cultural problematics or global capitalism, Xu compares his characters to "computer bugs cutting into the normal thought process."

Xu Bing Introduction to New English Calligraphy red line tracing book 1994-96. Courtesy of the artist.

Opening (1998), recently on view at P.S. 1, consisted of live silkworms on mulberry leaves in the main lobby of the museum. Children especially would return to the piece to see whether the worms were cocooned or hatching as moths. Like Xu's pig pieces, Opening places a natural process in the middle of a highly cultural setting. The dislocation invites people to consider their limits and expectations, as well as those of the museum. People weren't sure if they were supposed to touch the worms and leaves, observes Eva Levinson, the front-desk receptionist at P.S. 1 who sat across from the creatures for months. But when the worms fell onto the floor and out of the "art," people would quickly pick them up and put them back on the leaves.

Xu Bing Opening 1998 Courtesy of the artist. .

FRIENDLINESS is the only ideology, if it is one, that Xu articulates. His politics are more a matter of emphasis -- on accessibility and the social aspect of art, notions that he connects to the Maoist ideal of art for the people. "Even though I'm not directly thinking in a political way, my generation, my own cultural background, is very political," he says. Indeed, many contemporary Chinese artists have embraced Mao as a symbol to be both glorified and parodied. And strangely, those artists who are most engaged with the icons of oppression are reaping the greatest success in China today. The Chinese Pop artists, the Mao parodists, have left the avant-gardists in their wake, gaining more international attention and becoming highly professional and commercially successful within China. According to art historians like Gao Minglu, a co-curator of Inside Out: New Chinese Art, a recent exhibition at the Asia Society and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, this success has compelled artists like Xu Bing to leave China to seek funding abroad.

Abroad is treating Xu well. Those who have championed his work since the eighties, like Erickson, were validated by the MacArthur Foundation this year when it awarded Xu Bing one of its coveted "genius grants," giving the artist a few hundred thousand dollars to just keep doing what he's doing. In late October, he will be part of a group piece at New York's Museum of Modern Art, and this fall he'll have concurrent shows up in Bonn; Cologne; Brisbane; and Monterrey, Mexico. He's also slated for a 2001 solo show at the Smithsonian Institution's Sackler Art Gallery. For all these shows, he is slowly developing pieces -- elaborate linguistic systems, animal-based performance art -- that, through silence, provoke endless talk about what it all means.

Carly Berwick has written about art, media, and culture for the New York Times, Metropolis, New York magazine, and the Columbia Journalism Review, among other publications. She lives in Brooklyn.

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