Photo of the Day: Xu Bing Hangs Birds from the Sky at INK Studio

Our Photo of the Day series this week shares photos of recent openings at 798 and Caochangdi, adjacent creative zones central to Beijing’s contemporary art world.

INK Studio in Caochangdi recently opened a marvelous show for calligrapher, printmaker, and multimedia installation artist Xu Bing. Language and Nature is curated by Dr. Britta Erickson, a longtime collaborator of Xu’s who first worked with the artist in 1991 for his first institutional exhibition outside of Asia.

It features several expertly organized sections focusing on different eras of Xu’s career, including early woodcuts from his Shattered Jade series, original spreads from his famous Book from the Sky, and (our favorite) a selection from his The Living Word series in which the Pinyin Chinese word for bird, niao, transforms over a series of serial sculptures into the simplified character 鸟, then the traditional character 鳥, then, finally, into a small flock of birds soaring toward the gallery’s skylight.

Learn more about the exhibit here, and check out works from an (unrelated) Xu Bing retrospective at nearby UCCA here:

Photo of the Day: Xu Bing Hangs Words from the Sky at UCCA