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TIM MURRAY: I'm Tim Murray. I'm the Director of the Cornell Council for the Arts and the curator of the 2022 Cornell Biennial. And the biennial is very, very pleased to be co-sponsoring today's lecture by Xu Bing with the A.D. White Professor at Large Program and the Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art. As part of the biennial, we have unveiled this week at the Johnson Museum a brand new artwork by Xu Bing, which we hope you will enjoy visiting in the museum on the bottom floor.
Before I turn things over to Ellen Avril, the Johnson Museum's Chief Curator and the Judith H. Stoikov Curator of Asian Art, I thought it might be helpful to place this talk in the context of Xu Bing's visit to campus as an A.D. White Professor at Large.
At any one time, up to 20 outstanding intellectuals from across the globe hold the title of Andrew Dickson White Professor at Large and are considered full members of the Cornell faculty. During their six year term appointment, each Professor at Large comes to campus for one week, approximately for one week, in each three year period while Cornell classes are in session during the academic year under one mandate. And that is for them to enliven the intellectual and cultural life of the University.
There are currently 20 active Professors at Large representing five disciplines at Cornell, and the arts is one of the disciplines, we're very happy to say, because oftentimes we don't get that privilege at Cornell. The A.D. White Professor at Large program has been called one of the truly imaginary projects in American universities, bringing a steady stream of the world's foremost scientists, thinkers, and artists to the Cornell campus.
This is Xu Bing's second visit to campus as an A.D. White Professor at Large, the first being in 2018. Throughout his visit, Xu Bing has enlivened the spirit of the A.D. White program as he has interacted with colleagues and students from across the Cornell disciplines from art and Asian studies to the Cornell Botanic Gardens and the Atkinson Center for a Sustainable Future. Most typical of Xu Bing's impact on campus has been his enthusiastic and tireless interactions with our undergraduate and graduate students.
To kick off this visit, for example, Xu Bing held an interdisciplinary graduate seminar hosted by the East Asia program with 20 interdisciplinary students from anthropology and history to comparative literature and architecture. Then yesterday he met in front of his new work at the Johnson Museum with 40 undergraduates in art with whom he discussed not only his new piece, but also the challenges facing new artists, young artists across the globe. For me, it was enlivening to witness the energetic captivation of these students as I literally had to peel Xu Bing away for another event from their active questioning. Sorry, guys.
As intended by the A.D. White Professor at large program, Xu Bing has then inspired our Cornell students, our faculty, and staff to think the impact of art anew as it informs and reshapes intellectual and pedagogical practice across our great campus. What's remarkable is how lasting Xu Bing's presence at Cornell will be with the Johnson Museum's commission of this new artwork Background Story for its permanent collection.
I'm also happy to announce today that Xu Bing had a very productive conversation at noon with Christopher Dunn, Director at the Cornell Botanic Gardens, who joins us. They have agreed in principle to move forward with the commission of Xu Bing's proposal for an engraved stone bench entryway to the proposed Asian garden expected to be built outside the Nevin Information Center in early 2024.
So this will mark two permanent commissions by Xu Bing as a result of his A.D. White Professorship at Large. And there's been only one other A.D. White Professor, the artist Andy Goldsworthy, who left Cornell with a permanent installation, which you can see over at, wait, what's it called? Sapsucker Woods. Thanks.
So I hope that you will-- so I now would like to thank Ellen Avril for activating the creation of this new Background Story for permanent inclusion in the Johnson collection. Ellen's leadership has been crucial throughout Xu Bing's many visits to campus over the past 20 plus years. And now to introduce you, Bing, I welcome the Johnson Museum Senior Curator Ellen Avril.
ELLEN AVRIL: Thank you so much, Tim, for all your efforts to bring Xu Bing to campus over the years and for your energy, enthusiasm, and collegiality and fostering so many collaborations between the Cornell Biennial and the Johnson Museum of Art.
Globally admired artist Xu Bing works from studios in Beijing and in New York. Born in Chongqing, Xu Bing was interested in calligraphy and books from an early age. During the cultural revolution, he was sent to the countryside for re-education, where he developed a strong work ethic and his talent in calligraphy was employed in the making of propaganda.
He formally studied printmaking in the 1980s, earning his MFA from the Central Academy of Fine Arts Beijing before moving to New York in 1990 where he set up his Brooklyn studio. In 2007, he moved back to China to become Vice President of the Central Academy of Fine Arts and since 2014 has served as Professor and Director of the Academic Committee.
Xu Bing has received great acclaim for his installation works, including Book From The Sky and Phoenix, for his square word calligraphy, and other provocative series that have been exhibited at major museums in China, the United States, and around the world. He's the recipient of numerous international awards, including the United States State Department's 2014 Medal of Arts, an honorary doctorate from Columbia University, the Wales International Visual Arts Prize Artist Mundi, the Fukuoka Asian Arts and Cultural Prize, and a MacArthur Fellowship.
Xu Bing's connections with Cornell go back more than 20 years, and he has made several visits to campus to talk about his ongoing work. In 2002, his installation Living Word [? 2 ?] was presented at the Johnson Museum. And later as part of the 2018 Cornell Biennial, Xu Bing's animation about the history and techniques and future of Chinese calligraphic practice entitled The Character of Characters was exhibited at the Johnson Museum.
Recently the museum commissioned Xu Bing to make a new work in his ongoing series Background Story and to base it on a Chinese painting in the Johnson Museum's collection. Xu Bing chose a Ming dynasty painting by [INAUDIBLE] that was donated to the museum by generous alumna and supporter Judith Stoikov. Because of travel restrictions during the COVID-19 pandemic, the work had to be constructed in the artist's Beijing studio and shipped by sea to the United States. A long and arduous journey, I can tell you.
[LAUGHS]
This stunning and monumental work was installed at the museum earlier this month. Its creation and exhibition as part of the 2022 Cornell Biennial has been co-sponsored by the A.D. White Professor at Large program and supported at the Johnson Museum by the Ames Exhibition Endowment, the Lee C. Lee Exhibition Endowment for East Asian Art, and a generous gift from [INAUDIBLE].
Yesterday Xu Bing spent several hours working further and adding materials from local sources to the Background Story. Having only seen for the first time this week the original painting on which Background Story is based, he refined the appearance of the Background Story to capture the subtleties of the painting that did not come through in the digital images he was working from in Beijing.
It was fascinating to watch him work, and I encourage you all to see this wonderful artwork on display at the Johnson Museum. And thanks to Xu Bing's generosity, we are thrilled to be able to acquire it for the museum's permanent collection.
I also want to say personally and on behalf of the museum staff what an honor and pleasure it has been to work with Xu Bing on these exhibition projects over the years and to thank him for being here today. Please give a warm welcome to Xu Bing.
XU BING: [SPEAKING CHINESE]
INTERPRETER: Like whatever you want.
XU BING: [SPEAKING CHINESE]
INTERPRETER: Yeah, I can sit here.
XU BING: Thank you for that, Ellen, give a good introduce.
[SPEAKING CHINESE]
INTERPRETER: Good to know. I'm sorry. I didn't mean to make it a conversation only between Xu Bing and me, and I will definitely translate faithfully for sure. OK. So for her, Xu Bing just said I really appreciate all her efforts to curate my exhibition. And she is definitely the best curator I have ever seen.
XU BING: [SPEAKING CHINESE]
It's this one. Yeah.
[SPEAKING CHINESE]
INTERPRETER: I give my special thanks to Professor Timothy Murray, who is so interested in contemporary Chinese art and me specifically. And Xu Bing was saying, OK, I'm pretty famous in the United States because of you.
[LAUGHS]
XU BING: [SPEAKING CHINESE]
INTERPRETER: I really appreciate this A.D. White Professor at Cornell. But because of COVID, I didn't have a lot of academic contributions here.
XU BING: [SPEAKING CHINESE]
INTERPRETER: During my talk today, I will basically focusing on the recent exhibitions I've done in the past two or three years during the COVID-19.
XU BING: [SPEAKING CHINESE]
INTERPRETER: The title of my talk today is "What You Make of Art Today."
XU BING: [SPEAKING CHINESE]
INTERPRETER: Guiding us through my previous projects and some ongoing projects, I invite us to know how Xu Bing thinks of contemporary Chinese art today.
XU BING: [SPEAKING CHINESE]
INTERPRETER: Do you guys mind turn the lights off a little bit? Yeah, I think it's too bright for the audience to see the screen [INAUDIBLE].
XU BING: [SPEAKING CHINESE]
INTERPRETER: Thanks, Greg. Thanks.
XU BING: [SPEAKING CHINESE]
INTERPRETER: I will first introduce my current exhibition at the Johnson Museum, which is called The Background Story.
XU BING: [SPEAKING CHINESE]
INTERPRETER: 17 years ago, I was spending some time in Berlin and the museum there was creating a one man show for me. And at that time, I was just energetic every time I just want to bring some new stuff here.
XU BING: [SPEAKING CHINESE]
INTERPRETER: There is a very interesting history about that museum, which is the East Asian Art Museum in Berlin. And my initial interest about it is the works that is missing from the collection of that museum where during the Second World War, the Soviet Union armies took away more than 80% of the collections in that museum.
XU BING: [SPEAKING CHINESE]
INTERPRETER: OK. I'm very interested to bring my exhibitions in conversation with the specific history of that museum. While I was flying out from Berlin to Spain, I was having a lay off there. And I saw a plant behind the milky glass and I find a similarity between that scenario to classic Chinese ink art and painting.
XU BING: [SPEAKING CHINESE]
INTERPRETER: I find it really interesting to draw a connection between the lost collections in the Berlin Museum and my exhibition in the sense that the lost connections are not there. But what I'm going to do is use my creation of art to conjure the spirit of the lost art.
XU BING: [SPEAKING CHINESE]
INTERPRETER: This is the first one that I did the whole Background Story series. And at that time, I feel like this is a very familiar way to do it.
XU BING: [SPEAKING CHINESE]
INTERPRETER: In the following years, I've been working on this Background Story series and I've been working out 20 to 30 pieces of it. And every time I do it, I always find a new way to bring something new to it and bring the rich layers of the Chinese ink painting.
XU BING: [SPEAKING CHINESE]
INTERPRETER: This one was-- this Background Story series is located in the Museum of Art Pudong and consists of Chinese mountains and waters and dwellings.
XU BING: [SPEAKING CHINESE]
INTERPRETER: My way to do this kind of art installation is, OK, here is a blurry glass and I'm working behind it. I put branches, human waste, a lot of things behind it. And I am focusing on the play of light behind this blurry glass and make this blurry glass a representation of surface for my art.
XU BING: [SPEAKING CHINESE]
INTERPRETER: If you are pretty close to the blurry glass, you will probably see what's behind it. But if you keep a distance between it and it is really like a Chinese ink painting.
XU BING: [SPEAKING CHINESE]
INTERPRETER: For my art, I was trying to invent a new language for the art that is not spoken by any other artists.
XU BING: [SPEAKING CHINESE]
INTERPRETER: If you want to speak something that is never said by others, you need to find the right way to express it.
XU BING: [SPEAKING CHINESE]
INTERPRETER: There are definitely some methods that were used by the masters, but I'm not going to do that way.
XU BING: [SPEAKING CHINESE]
INTERPRETER: I'm also not going to use the methodology that have been put into my previous arts because it happened like 30 years ago. Everything has changed. Now I'm in a new situation. I'm going to do it in a new way.
XU BING: [SPEAKING CHINESE]
INTERPRETER: I always find a new way to do my art installations. It's all about innovation and invention. Sometimes people don't know this piece and the other piece, it all belongs to me.
XU BING: [SPEAKING CHINESE]
INTERPRETER: So my previous art and my new art has formed an enclosed circle in which I am at the center of that. All these different perspectives of the way I do art becomes a footnote of me and my art career.
XU BING: [SPEAKING CHINESE]
INTERPRETER: What is the most important to me is how you think of art rather than speaking of styles.
XU BING: [SPEAKING CHINESE]
INTERPRETER: This piece was produced in the number three Beijing plastic industry.
XU BING: [SPEAKING CHINESE]
INTERPRETER: This is the first time I bring the wasted plastics as a new material into my art. Actually it happens during the transition of transforming this industrial space into an art space.
XU BING: [SPEAKING CHINESE]
INTERPRETER: This landscape painting is a unique creation of classic Chinese art. It is so beautiful that I think it is a warning to our contemporary artists.
XU BING: [SPEAKING CHINESE]
INTERPRETER: And I think it is kind of ironic in a sense that nowadays we are using this plastic materials to replicate traditional Chinese landscape painting.
XU BING: [SPEAKING CHINESE]
INTERPRETER: What is so interesting about this project is that what we see is not a painting in a traditional way.
XU BING: [SPEAKING CHINESE]
INTERPRETER: It is not Western oil painting or the Chinese ink painting.
XU BING: [SPEAKING CHINESE]
INTERPRETER: It is a painting that is all about how I play with the light.
XU BING: [SPEAKING CHINESE]
INTERPRETER: I do it in this way because I want to replicate traditional Chinese landscape painting. Because of the time duration, the painting was oxidized and the ink and the paper, which is the material, merged together, which creates a very rich layer of the landscape painting.
XU BING: [SPEAKING CHINESE]
INTERPRETER: This is a great way to replicate this, since light is a very special mediation through which I can do it.
XU BING: [SPEAKING CHINESE]
INTERPRETER: This Background Story was exhibited in Suzhou Museum. And both the Johnson Museum and Suzhou Museum was--
XU BING: [SPEAKING CHINESE]
INTERPRETER: Yeah, was designed by--
XU BING: [INAUDIBLE]
INTERPRETER: Yeah. [INAUDIBLE] Yeah. Thanks.
XU BING: [SPEAKING CHINESE]
INTERPRETER: This piece was exhibited in the Taipei City Art Museum. And my piece was attached to the outer surface of the museum building. Well, from inside, you can only see the back of that installation.
XU BING: [SPEAKING CHINESE]
INTERPRETER: And that piece, I imitate the art piece of an artist named [? Dong ?] [? Xichang. ?]
XU BING: [SPEAKING CHINESE]
INTERPRETER: Now we're coming to a new art exhibition which is currently in the Pudong Art Museum in Shanghai. And it is called Gravitational Arena.
XU BING: [SPEAKING CHINESE]
INTERPRETER: I want to talk a little bit about why I want to do this art and about some current concerns. So I was making some comparisons to think of if we human civilization really made some progress. Is there the real difference between using weapons of mass destruction to eliminate a specific race very different from to kill a person with a spear? Are we really making some progress toward our civilization?
XU BING: [SPEAKING CHINESE]
INTERPRETER: We definitely need to think of the [? animality ?] in human beings.
XU BING: [SPEAKING CHINESE]
INTERPRETER: I feel like we are torn from inside. It is hard to find a common ground to think what is happening right now. It is also hard to find a shared consensus to think of our civilization.
XU BING: [SPEAKING CHINESE]
INTERPRETER: Well, from my perspective, different civilizations are very centered on their understanding of some very preliminary stuff.
XU BING: [SPEAKING CHINESE]
INTERPRETER: It reminds me of a very famous novel written by Garcia Marquez entitled One Hundred Years of Loneliness. In the starting part, people are in the iceberg and there's no civilization. We cannot talk to each other. So we only use our gestures to point this stuff and that stuff.
XU BING: [SPEAKING CHINESE]
INTERPRETER: The preliminary difference between different civilizations can be seen from the different word roots of different civilization.
XU BING: [SPEAKING CHINESE]
INTERPRETER: While we're cultivated by our civilization, and in the meantime, we also deviate from each other in this cultivation.
XU BING: [SPEAKING CHINESE]
INTERPRETER: I accept this invitation from the curators from the Pudong Art Museum to design a specific installation in this very tall space.
XU BING: [SPEAKING CHINESE]
INTERPRETER: All I think about is how to make the best of this immense height of this space. Actually I definitely face some difficulties when trying to put an insulation in a space like that. But after that, I was thinking I was also pushing myself to make the best of it.
XU BING: [SPEAKING CHINESE]
INTERPRETER: Because this space is huge, so I also put a mirror on the ground to double the space, to double the height of the space.
XU BING: [SPEAKING CHINESE]
INTERPRETER: The limitation of the height of this space becomes an important element of this installation.
XU BING: [SPEAKING CHINESE]
INTERPRETER: I choose a paragraph from the philosopher Wittgenstein and his famous discussion of the duck and rabbit head.
XU BING: [SPEAKING CHINESE]
INTERPRETER: Building on Wittgenstein's concepts, I turned English into square word calligraphy, as is shown on the slide.
XU BING: [SPEAKING CHINESE]
INTERPRETER: I find a similarity between Wittgenstein's debate and the square word calligraphy. You cannot really tell if it is English or Chinese.
XU BING: [SPEAKING CHINESE]
INTERPRETER: So at first this is a two dimensional space. It is flat. But I turned it into a three dimensional wave by distort the characters to the ground.
XU BING: [SPEAKING CHINESE]
INTERPRETER: It's like you putting these characters on a highway. You can only see them when you're driving in a car and on the highway.
XU BING: [SPEAKING CHINESE]
INTERPRETER: Using the method such as the stretching of the characters and the distortion of the characters, I invite our audience to step in a wormhole model of this space. And there is no ideal perspective of this installation.
XU BING: [SPEAKING CHINESE]
INTERPRETER: Each part of the installation is an interruption to the other elements.
XU BING: [SPEAKING CHINESE]
INTERPRETER: Each character in this installation is unique because at first it is not distorted. But once it is distorted, the size of the characters are totally changed.
XU BING: [SPEAKING CHINESE]
INTERPRETER: The position narrative of each character is determined in its relation to other characters.
XU BING: [SPEAKING CHINESE]
INTERPRETER: What is really complex about this installation is that every character is connected to each other. And once you change one of them, the whole installation is changed.
XU BING: [SPEAKING CHINESE]
INTERPRETER: I was actually thinking if there is an intrinsic connection between 9/11 and the Russian Ukraine war. From my perspective, there is definitely this connection. But the thing is we're not able to figure it out by our intellectual mind right now.
XU BING: [SPEAKING CHINESE]
INTERPRETER: Compared to the history of the universe and outer space, the history of human beings and technology is just so short that we cannot even get 1% of our understanding of the true knowledge of the universe.
XU BING: [SPEAKING CHINESE]
INTERPRETER: These are some pictures that are taken during our production process of this installation.
XU BING: [SPEAKING CHINESE]
INTERPRETER: There are five floors of this museum. And what I want to show the audience is that since you're on different floor, you will get a totally different perspective of this art installation. And the pictures shown on the slide was taken on the fourth floor where you can get the best perspective of the installation.
XU BING: [SPEAKING CHINESE]
INTERPRETER: Even if you're on the fourth floor, which is the best position to view this installation inside the museum, you cannot still get the ideal perspective. Actually for my design, the ideal perspective was hanging beyond this art museum. That is beyond the roof of museum. There is one point up there.
XU BING: [SPEAKING CHINESE]
INTERPRETER: What is so interesting about the concept of my installation is that there is an ideal perspective, but you can never get it.
XU BING: [SPEAKING CHINESE]
INTERPRETER: Nowadays museums becomes a landmark for internet influencers. Everyone went there and you can do whatever you want and enjoy your own connection with this installation since there is a mirror that I place on the ground. So you can basically, like the second picture on the left, you can just basically lying on the glass and take selfies and post on social media.
XU BING: [SPEAKING CHINESE]
INTERPRETER: And for the screenshots on the right, this is just [INAUDIBLE]. Like this self labeling.
XU BING: [SPEAKING CHINESE]
INTERPRETER: I have my own attitude towards my own installation and the current situation. I hope my installation can be understood and shared by both the internet influencers and the experts from art history.
XU BING: [SPEAKING CHINESE]
INTERPRETER: From my perspective, I hope that-- I used to have an installation that aims to serve the people. But now because of the drastic development of modern technology and digital media, the audience are no longer the ones we need to entertain, but they necessarily become an intrinsic part of my own art. They are even the materials of my installation.
XU BING: [SPEAKING CHINESE]
INTERPRETER: There is a very important concept in my career that is the copies of copies. Well, from my perspective, what this internet influencer was doing is just to make endless copies of copies of copies.
XU BING: [SPEAKING CHINESE]
INTERPRETER: Then we're going to my next project.
XU BING: [SPEAKING CHINESE]
INTERPRETER: This is a art rocket project I have been involved in with in the past few years.
XU BING: [SPEAKING CHINESE]
INTERPRETER: I worked with a privately run Chinese space rocket company.
XU BING: [SPEAKING CHINESE]
INTERPRETER: We need to do this project that here is a rocket. And on the surface of this, on the surface of this rocket are all the characters from Xu Bing's most famous installation, Book From The Sky.
XU BING: [SPEAKING CHINESE]
INTERPRETER: I find it pretty hard to deal with this astronomy project, because I used to be really fond of the daily materials rather than a rocket like this.
XU BING: [SPEAKING CHINESE]
INTERPRETER: But I don't want to give up this opportunity to do something special. And I feel like we're in an era that is all about space and going out of space.
XU BING: [SPEAKING CHINESE]
INTERPRETER: I did some research on spacecrafts and the history of outer space, and I feel like there's so much projects to do with that. And actually there are just so limited materials that we get from outer space and use them on our art projects.
XU BING: [SPEAKING CHINESE]
INTERPRETER: There used to be a way to do this so called space art. It's basically you put something, you put artifacts on the spaceship and you shoot it in outer space and then it comes back. But for me what is so special about this space art is it needs to happen in outer space. It needs to illustrate the relation between human and outer space.
XU BING: [SPEAKING CHINESE]
INTERPRETER: We put a magic cube inside the rocket.
XU BING: [SPEAKING CHINESE]
INTERPRETER: We hope that this magic cube can receive some data from the outer space and send it back to us.
XU BING: [SPEAKING CHINESE]
INTERPRETER: This is a picture.
XU BING: [SPEAKING CHINESE]
INTERPRETER: What is not very lucky about this project is that it just failed. It's not in the right track.
XU BING: [SPEAKING CHINESE]
INTERPRETER: This is a technical issue.
XU BING: [SPEAKING CHINESE]
INTERPRETER: Though this project failed, but it just gives me an opportunity to rethink a lot of questions, such as what is the limitation of art? What is the boundary between technology and art? And how do we succeed in combining art and technology together?
XU BING: [SPEAKING CHINESE]
INTERPRETER: Though the whole project failed, but as you can see from the slide, this part as a component of the rocket succeed in the sense that because various components need to detach from the main rocket and these interrogate within the Earth's atmosphere and fall back to the Earth.
XU BING: [SPEAKING CHINESE]
INTERPRETER: When I first go to the spot and see that in person, I feel like this is gorgeous. It's like a huge injured animal lying there that needs to be rescued by us.
XU BING: [SPEAKING CHINESE]
INTERPRETER: We did it perfectly before we send it into the space. But inevitably when it's contact or touch with the Earth's atmosphere, it inevitably gets some injury to this rocket.
XU BING: [SPEAKING CHINESE]
INTERPRETER: Actually, this has to do with a Chinese wisdom. We as artists, we need to leave some space for the nature and for the space to create their own art piece. So that in this sense, we are collaborating with nature.
XU BING: [SPEAKING CHINESE]
INTERPRETER: Well, when I was there, I find these craters underground. The diameters of this is 28 meters, which is huge.
XU BING: [SPEAKING CHINESE]
INTERPRETER: There are also some scattered debris from the rocket, which seems to me like gorgeous flowers on the ground.
XU BING: [SPEAKING CHINESE]
INTERPRETER: This is just so fascinating to me. It's what I would call the art of Earth.
XU BING: [SPEAKING CHINESE]
INTERPRETER: For most common I would term it like the Earth arch is basically like it's all about how humans exploit the nature and how you make the best use of the nature. And there is a tension between artists as human beings and nature. But for my project, it's just takes 0.3 seconds to finish this Earth art.
XU BING: [SPEAKING CHINESE]
INTERPRETER: It makes me think that is this an Earth art or is it just an [? occasional ?] art? But neither really works for me because from my perspective, both the Earth art and the [? occasional ?] art are made by artists. They are artifacts.
XU BING: [SPEAKING CHINESE]
INTERPRETER: I would like to invent a term called random confrontational art, which is we don't do it purposely. The artifacts is not the destination of the art. But we just pursue it and we randomly encounter it and confront it on our way to make this art.
XU BING: [SPEAKING CHINESE]
INTERPRETER: Probably I need to speed up.
XU BING: [SPEAKING CHINESE]
INTERPRETER: This is my new art project and it is entitled [? Legs ?] on a Satellite.
XU BING: [SPEAKING CHINESE]
INTERPRETER: Actually this is a decommissioned satellite, but it is still functioning well in this space. So I'm going to use that for my art project.
XU BING: [SPEAKING CHINESE]
INTERPRETER: Why it is called the-- why it is called The [? Legs ?] on the Satellite is basically because there is a screen attached on the surface of the satellite that is facing towards the outer space.
XU BING: [SPEAKING CHINESE]
INTERPRETER: And there is a selfie stick that is also attached to the screen, which is really stretches out so that it can take pictures of both the satellite and what is appearing on the screen of the satellites.
XU BING: [SPEAKING CHINESE]
INTERPRETER: This satellite orbits Earth 16 times per day. And while it passes the territory of China, we will send our animation to the satellite. And when it comes back again, it will send back the pictures it took from the outer space. Then we juxtaposed the animation and the images from the outer space.
XU BING: [SPEAKING CHINESE]
INTERPRETER: And our animation is based on the data that we received from the satellite.
XU BING: [SPEAKING CHINESE]
INTERPRETER: This is probably the first animation that was done in outer space.
XU BING: [SPEAKING CHINESE]
INTERPRETER: What is really so interesting about this standard person, as you can see from the screen, the satellite-- OK, so there are two things. The first one is this man, this person is carrying a bag. And there are different scripts and characters contained in the bag. Once it passes different countries, the characters or the words or the letters from that country will pop out from the bag. And it draws a connection between the characters and that nation.
XU BING: [SPEAKING CHINESE]
INTERPRETER: We're still working on this project and this animation. We will send the data to the satellite weekly.
XU BING: [SPEAKING CHINESE]
INTERPRETER: It is so interesting to see both the outer space and my animation appears here.
XU BING: [SPEAKING CHINESE]
INTERPRETER: These pictures are still not uploaded to the satellite right now. Like these ones.
XU BING: [SPEAKING CHINESE]
INTERPRETER: What is kind of unfortunate is that in the past few weeks, the satellite is not functioning well and it is kind of lost to us. We send data to it, but it's not feeding back to us.
XU BING: [SPEAKING CHINESE]
INTERPRETER: Well, it did send back some data. But sometimes it's just unclear and sometimes it's just pixels that we cannot use to produce this animation.
XU BING: [SPEAKING CHINESE]
INTERPRETER: Now the satellite [? component ?] is still trying their best to contact the satellite and trying to make it work well.
XU BING: [SPEAKING CHINESE]
INTERPRETER: Actually our storyline about this satellite is also tinged by this disfunctioning. My primary intention is that this project will end when the satellite stop working.
XU BING: [SPEAKING CHINESE]
INTERPRETER: OK. These are some representations of the connections between the deserted satellites that is left there in the outer space and the traffic in the space that is grasped by the screen here.
XU BING: [SPEAKING CHINESE]
INTERPRETER: OK. So actually there are two destinations of a satellite when it is discommissioned. The company will normally save like 20% of the energy of the satellite so that it can be reshoot into the right track. That is called the destination track where all these deserted satellites meet each other.
XU BING: [SPEAKING CHINESE]
INTERPRETER: There's a second option for these satellites that they can fall back to Earth. There is a place in Pacific Ocean that is called the tomb of the satellites.
XU BING: [SPEAKING CHINESE]
INTERPRETER: That's my current project.
XU BING: [SPEAKING CHINESE]
INTERPRETER: They still want to hear more about Xu Bing's current projects, so I think though we are running out of time, we're still going to keep you guys here for a couple minutes.
XU BING: [SPEAKING CHINESE]
INTERPRETER: Sorry. We will skip the Dragonfly Eyes and we'll just directly go to this artificial intelligence generated film.
XU BING: [SPEAKING CHINESE]
INTERPRETER: This project is called Artificial Intelligence Infinite Film. What is so infinite about it is that there is no directors, no photographers, no actors. It's all generated by the artificial intelligence and the algorithms.
XU BING: [SPEAKING CHINESE]
INTERPRETER: OK. So this project is really an interactive and biologic production between this artificial intelligence and audience. And there are actually five subcategories of this film such as the love films, the violent films, the scientific films. And for an audience you can spend no matter how much amount of time you want to spend with artificial intelligence and it will totally satisfy you.
XU BING: [SPEAKING CHINESE]
INTERPRETER: This project first come out in the fifth Pingyao International Film Festival. And as you can see from the screen, this is the situation that the artificial intelligence film was shown to the audience, which is made by themselves.
XU BING: [SPEAKING CHINESE]
INTERPRETER: For this project, it is actually also a research project that is in close cooperation between artists like Xu Bing and [INAUDIBLE] from Central Art Academy and [SPEAKING CHINESE] from Hong Kong Technology University.
XU BING: [INAUDIBLE] from Harvard.
INTERPRETER: And [INAUDIBLE] from Harvard University.
XU BING: [SPEAKING CHINESE]
INTERPRETER: The reason why I want to experiment with the AI film is that I see there is definitely a bright future of the artificial intelligence in their endless self improvement. And compared to that, we as human artists, how can we deal with the film like that.
XU BING: [SPEAKING CHINESE]
INTERPRETER: For film makers, there are definitely a lot of limitations such as your political ambitions and some commercial interests that will all constrain you and constrain your artistic thoughts.
XU BING: [SPEAKING CHINESE]
INTERPRETER: Actually what is so great about this artificial intelligence is that the technology will definitely help us to find the intrinsic structure of things that is in our art and how we reorganize these kinds of things through this artificial intelligence.
XU BING: [SPEAKING CHINESE]
INTERPRETER: And for the film specifically, the artificial intelligence will definitely help us to pursue what we can not achieve as human beings.
XU BING: [SPEAKING CHINESE]
[VIDEO PLAYBACK]
- Why do you always say that?
- Because I've fallen in love with a guy. I just can't stop thinking about him. Did he call you? No, not yet. But he told me that he was going to ask his friend out later this week. He said it would be really fun.
I heard that he just had a crush on you, didn't he? Oh yes, he did. I fell in love with him in 10 minutes. He was my first kiss. How are you feeling tonight? I mean, I can't believe this. So cute. you know, it seems like we've been dating for years now.
[END PLAYBACK]
XU BING: [SPEAKING CHINESE]
INTERPRETER: So it's basically you audience insert a sentence into the program and then the artificial intelligence will just produce a film for you.
[VIDEO PLAYBACK]
- We're not sure. Maybe some kind of radiation accident.
- That was a UFO crash. A UFO crashed here. Oh no. Wait a minute. Have you seen my little boy? He just disappeared. Is he alive?
- He has been missing since landing in Paris three days ago. He has apparently been abducted by aliens. But where was he taken from?
- So far I think all our military equipment was destroyed. We had to buy new stuff for several weeks. And all of this is happening within weeks of the start of our war production program. We don't know what their intentions are, but we're sending out our aircrafts.
At the time, there were only two people who flew as many missions as I did, myself and my great friend and classmate, [INAUDIBLE]. He was actually a pilot before the war, so we had some experience flying planes. What can we do about that? It's a war. But there would be a huge loss of life. I just want to go home and watch TV or whatever.
- What's going on here? This is ridiculous. I hate crime scenes. It looks like somebody was killed. We've heard that there was a murder here, right? There have to be some witnesses. Mary, we've been trying to contact her for some time now. We've even called her on our mobile phone several times. No response so far.
It took some time for the police to find her body, but finally one person came on to find the body. So what then? Who killed her? Well, I don't really know anything about it. The cops were looking for some suspect. Just wanted to say that I am alive. I have just arrived at my home after being on the bus.
[END PLAYBACK]
XU BING: [SPEAKING CHINESE]
TIM MURRAY: We want to thank Xu Bing very much for this [INAUDIBLE] presentation, the generosity of [INAUDIBLE] both new works at Cornell and introducing us to the imaginaries of AI and outer space and sharing with us his space disaster. So thank you, Xu Bing. Thank you for coming back to Cornell. Thank you very much for the translation. Thank you for coming.
XU BING: [SPEAKING CHINESE]
This lecture is part of an A.D. White Professors-at-Large (ADW-PAL) visit and is co-sponsored by the Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art and the Cornell Council for the Arts.
Xu Bing is an internationally acclaimed Chinese artist whose creative and cultural interventions touch on the fields of public and ecological art, printmaking, new media installations, drawing, and sculpture. His biography charts the path of the international influence of Chinese contemporary art and its complex place in Chinese culture over the last forty years.
For the 2022 Cornell Biennial, the Johnson Museum commissioned his newest “Background Story,” a lyrical light box in dialogue with an historical Chinese ink painting in the Museum’s collection. Through the manipulation of recycled plastic and miscellaneous trash from daily life, the artist dilutes or intensifies light to “draw” an ink-like image on glass that conveys traditional Chinese reverence for nature while serving as a warning about humans’ ongoing mistreatment of the environment.
