WHERE DOES THE DUST ITSELF COLLECT?, Xu Bing, 2011
at Museum of Chinese American, NY http://www.mocanyc.org/
and Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, NY http://www.lmcc.net/
http://insite.lmcc.net/projects-home/?id=15
The first American installation of a project by renowned Chinese artist Xu Bing, originally created in 2004 in Cardiff, Wales utilizing the dust that the artist collected from the streets of Lower Manhattan in the aftermath of 9/11. Recreating a field of dust across a floor surface, punctuated by the outline of a Zen Buddhist poem, the work explores the relationship between the material and the spiritual world, and the complicated circumstances created by different world perspectives.
Xu Bing (1955- ) was born in Chongqing, China but grew up in Beijing. He was sent to the countryside to perform farm labor as an “educated youth” during the final years of the Cultural Revolution and then entered The Central Academy of Fine Arts (CAFA) in 1977, where he studied and taught in the printmaking department, receiving both his bachelor’s and master’s degrees there. In 1990 Xu moved to the United States, eventually relocating to New York in 1992. His work has been the subject of numerous solo and group exhibitions at museums spanning the globe and he has been the recipient of awards and honors including a 1999 MacArthur Fellowship and an honorary Doctor of Humane Letters from Columbia University in 2010. He currently works out of his studios in Beijing and Brooklyn, and since January 2008 has served as vice president of CAFA, his alma mater.
This exhibit is made possible by support from the Ford Foundation.
The exhibition space in The Spinning Wheel Building has been donated by the
Greystone Management Corporation.
Image: Xu Bing, courtesy of the artist.