Shan cheng 山城 (Mountain City) from the Shattered Jade Series (Sui yu ji 碎玉集),

1982

Xu Bing began printmaking in 1977, at the newly reorganized Central Academy of Fine Art. He received instruction from artists such as Li Hua, whose Four Modernizations is also on display. Throughout his career, Xu's work has cohered around the concept of the word in image-making and culture. This interest may originate from his early training as a woodcut artist; each woodblock image is like a printed character, a relationship that plays on the pictographic origins of Chinese writing. Shattered Jade is a series of small prints that feature personalized images of aspects of village life. Produced at the end of the Cultural Revolution (1966–76), this series is remarkable because of the absence of overt political or didactic content, which had characterized Socialist Realist art and aesthetics up to that moment.