Rice field, Xu Bing

Exhibition Label:
"Selections for the Summer," Jun-2006, Mary Dusenbury
In the 20th century, China experienced revolutionary zeal, brutal violence, the affirmation and rejection of tradition, fear, hope, despair, and dizzying radical changes. The four artists whose work is shown here interpreted the life of their times in very different ways: Ding Cong’s handscroll is a biting political satire; Zhao Yannian, another daring social critic, used his rough-carved woodblock prints to aid and celebrate the revolutionary cause; Zhao Shao-ang’s ink paintings evoke the past and the timeless beauty of nature and at first seem unrelated to the realities of contemporary Chinese life; Xu Bing plays with Chinese ideographs to comment on meaning and the distortion of meaning.

In this print Xu Bing has zoomed in on the Chinese word for rice field (田). The rice-field ideograph embodies China’s long history as a rice-based culture whose written language has evolved over time from the stylized representation of objects. The shape of the ideograph imitates the typical layout of village rice fields, a series of flooded paddies intersected by dykes serving as pathways.

Rice Field was created the same year that Xu Bing published a series of small prints that depicted the rural life he experienced during the Cultural Revolution. Like many other intellectuals, he had been sent to work in the countryside; unlike most others, he found that he enjoyed the hard work and rhythm of agricultural life and the company of his village neighbors. The humor and warm humanity of this series of Small Prints delighted the villagers and were welcomed by an art world tired of the generic “happy peasant” typical of the revolutionary art of the time. Rice Field is more abstract than Xu Bing’s earlier prints of village life; it is as much about repeating patterns as it is a depiction of the young rice plants and tadpoles that inhabit the flooded fields. Unlike his tiny self-contained illustrations of village life, this image has no boundaries; it looks as though someone using an aerial camera has focused on a bit of landscape below.

The deep consonance of word, image and “reality” epitomized in Rice Field is the foundation from which Xu Bing’s later work emerged—work in which he shattered that consonance to challenge the very meaning of language and culture.