This interview was conducted at Today Art Museum, Beijing on 18 July 2009.


Biography:

Xu Bing (b. 1955, Chongqing) is an artist and the current Vice President of the Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing.

Xu grew up in Beijing and graduated in 1981 from the Department of Printmaking at the Central Academy of Fine Arts) where he pursued his M.A. degree from 1984 to 1987.

In 1987, Xu began working on the project A Book from the Sky, which featured the invention of more than two thousand pseudo-Chinese characters. The following year, Xu organized an exhibition of his own work at the National Art Museum of China, where he showed the first completed section of A Book from the Sky. He also exhibited the piece in the ‘China/Avant-Garde Exhibition’ in 1989. The next year, Xu began working on Ghosts Pounding the Wall (Gui daqiang), a large-scale, outdoor ink-on-paper rubbing from Beijing’s Jinshanling section of the Great Wall.

In 1990, Xu accepted an invitation from the University of Wisconsin-Madison to visit the United States as an honorary fellow. Xu’s work has been widely exhibited, and in 1999, he was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship. He returned to China in 2008.


簡歷︰

徐冰，1955年生於重慶，在北京長大。藝術家，时任中央美術學院副院長。

1977—1981年間就讀於中央美術學院版畫系。1984年開始攻讀該院碩士研究生， 1987年獲該院碩士學位。畢業後，徐冰開始設計及刻製兩千餘「偽漢字」，是為⟨天書⟩的組成部分。1988年在北京中國美術館舉行《徐冰版畫展》，並首次展出⟨天書⟩的第一階段。1989年在《中國現代藝術展》上也展出了⟨天書⟩。
 
1990年與學生和助手在北京金山嶺長城開始巨型作品⟨鬼打牆⟩的野外拓印工作。翌年，接受美國麥迪森 - 威斯康辛大學邀請，作榮譽藝術家赴美。自此旅居美國。

九十年代及2000年代間，徐冰於歐美參與及舉行不少展覽，蜚聲國際。1999年獲得美國文化界最高獎：麥克•亞瑟獎（MacArthur Foundation ‘genius’ award）。2008年回到中國，出任中央美術學院副院長一職。