Bing Xu Art for Sale and Sold Prices

Painter

(b Chongqing, China, 1955) Chinese Printmaker and Calligrapher. Educated in the Classics, Xu Bing had an insatiable appetite for Chinese texts and his education until the Cultural Revolution. His later immigration to the United States morphed his comprehension of newly minted simplified Chinese characters in China and how non-Chinese readers and writers viewed Chinese as a language and as art…[A] long respected conceptual artist, Xu Bing is multifaceted in talent and ideas. Xu probes audiences to reconsider ideas of calligraphy, symbolism of art and knowledge through language. Xu Bing subtly suggested how the amalgamation of various cultures and their products affects our perception of a piece of artwork. Despite the high walls languages build between people, Xu Bing creates abstractions of the Chinese language to enable viewers of all nationalities to associate with and value his works. (Credit: Christie’s, Hong Kong, Asian Contemporary Sale, December 1, 2008, lot 944)