A specialist in investigating language as a source of confusion as much as communication, Xu Bing raises issues that have bedeviled many Chinese of his generation. Born in Chongqing, he grew up in Beijing, graduated from art school there, and moved to the United States in 1990. The early Book from the Sky (1987–91), begun in Beijing, offers 604 pages in four printed volumes. For this project, Xu designed 4,000 meaningless characters mimicking the appearance of standard Chinese calligraphy. As movable type carved in wood, these offered a nonsense “vocabulary” that brings to mind the distortions and obfuscations of official documents. To extend the joke, in 1994 he designed a follow-up series unintelligible to the Chinese but legible to English-speakers who could make out letters forming each character. Concurrently, he began subversive “scroll paintings”; produced inventive sculptural installations, such as the suspended Monkeys Grasp for the Moon (2001; Washington, D.C., Smithsonian Institution, Arthur M. Sackler Gallery), which uses the word for “monkey” in the native scripts of many languages to suggest a chain of simians linked by arms and tails; and experimented as well with other media, including video and installations. After Xu returned in 2008 to Beijing, where he currently serves as the president of his alma mater, the Central Academy of Fine Arts, he took on broader themes including environmental and labor issues. See also .
An idiosyncratic, whimsical painter who championed modern forms of personal expression in Buenos Aires at an early date, Xul Solar invested his art with spiritual, even mystical interests. His utopian desire to unify all mankind underlay a lifelong inquiry into fantasy as an expression of intuitively perceived truths. Endowed with a lively intellect, he also wrote, produced sculpture, devised two imaginary languages, invented games and gadgets, and designed buildings, including his Buenos Aires home, today a museum. Born (to immigrant parents from Germany and Italy) and raised in the Buenos Aires area, he began training as an architect but soon turned his attention to literature, philosophy, languages, and comparative religions. From 1912 until 1924, he lived in Europe, where he became familiar with cubism, futurism, dada, and other modern tendencies. During these years, he began to paint (watercolor remained his preferred medium), and he soon simplified his birth name, Oscar Agustin Alejandro Schulz Solari, to Xul Solar. His most familiar work deploys signs, symbols, and allusive images across a shallow field. In spirit, these often recall Paul Klee’s delicate amalgams of representation and abstraction. Other works—mainly from mid-career—grapple more directly with solid form and perspective, often stimulated by architectural motifs. Upon his permanent return to Buenos Aires, he formed a deep and lasting friendship with experimental writer Jorge Luis Borges, who once called his paintings “documents of the extraterrestrial world.” He also adopted pre-Columbian motifs to reinforce his art’s Latin American identity. While associated with avant-garde circles, Xul Solar remained generally indifferent to public acclaim, choosing instead to concentrate on his art while also pursuing visionary impulses through study of astrology, Theosophy, kabbalah, meditation, and other philosophical pathways to personal and universal enlightenment.