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.