XU BING
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Xu Bing is a contemporary artist living in New York, who incorporates his Chinese ancestry into his new age approach on art. Xu Bing was born in Chongqung, and was raised in Bejing China. In 1975, when Xu Bing was nineteen years old, China was experiencing a cultural revolution, which drastically changed the life of every Chinese citizen. The revolution began when President Mao was worried that the Chinese society was developing anti-socialist feelings, and were beginning to favor capitalism. In order to maintain the status quo, Mao instituted various "movements," which oppressed citizens, intensified disparities in social classes, and restricted many kinds of education and art. After being forced to work on farms to support the revolution, at the age of twenty-two, Xu Bing decided that he wanted to pursue his passion for art. His most famous piece (or infamous) consists of thousands of characters he created to appear as Chinese text; however, these characters have no meanings which he created in 1988 and was featured in the Elvehjem Museum. An article in Time magazine ("The Strokes" Nov. 2002) described Xu-Bing's creation of characters as "his signatureand most controversialproject, [consisting of] 100 books of nonsense characters that he designed, carved and printed himself. The books look like intellectual tomes of poetry, religious treatises, reference worksall beautifully bound like the scholarly texts of the 19th century Qing dynasty, finished with indigo paper covers and placed in handmade walnut boxes...