Looking backwards from the horoscope - Xu Bing’s Gravitational Arena (2022)

I heard about Xu Bing a long time ago when I was in middle school sitting in the pottery classroom in the school’s basement. Our art teacher played us documentaries on influential contemporary artists throughout and Xu’s works were recorded in one of them. His most well-known work Book from the Sky (天书, 1987-1991) was introduced to us bunch of seven-graders as we were confused yet intrigued. Xu, making his appearance since this, as one of the first Chinese contemporary artists I know by name, was often acknowledged by myself and those art enthusiasts I met. 

I have always had a feeling that Xu Bing was a huge celebrity in the Chinese art world, and it fills up a little well of the vanity of mine every time I dropped his name to others. All I knew was his works were whimsical plays and twists around Chinese characters, with a dash of irony, less research was made. Even when I reached the time that I should look into artists at deeper conceptual levels, I didn’t build much empathy towards Xu’s works. Just recently I visited the Museum of Art Pudong in Shanghai, where Xu has his work Gravitational Arena (引力剧场, 2022) on display at that moment. It felt like going to a concert of a singer I liked but I only heard one or two songs, exhilarating, but also scary. 

The exhibition occupied the whole of the gallery’s central atrium, which takes up all four floors’s indoor cavities. And from every floor, there are narrow windows for the audience to look at the center piece from different angles. The first floor has a large horizontal viewing bay that allows the audience to discover the piece before even getting into the exhibition itself. The audiences will go through series of prints from Xu’s project portfolio before entering the central atrium, where the terribly oppressing installation consists of Xu’s invented characters, pours down from the bare white glass ceiling like the sand inside an hourglass, dashes straight down into the ground. With the help of the mirror on the floor, it then pierces through reality and blooms again beneath the audience’s sight. I found it hard to capture this whole sight with my bear eyes with one look. The sequence of looking up and down, and observing the work made me physically nauseous, and with my attempt of trying to actually read the text, my head spun and I was on my tiptoe. The pure white atrium was hypnotizing. I knew that I could not even simply read the text, as on the one hand, I didn’t understand them, and on the other hand, as if the gravity was pulling the texts into the ground, the middle section of the hanged text board was purposely distorted. Then it comes to the million-dollar question: how do you read the text? Or which angle do the audiences posit themselves that will make the text readable? According to Xu’s explanation, the “ideal” viewing point that makes the text completely readable, is about 200 meters above the museum’s ceiling, which is theoretically achievable since the ceiling of the hollow cavity was made of glass. 

The text itself, composed of Xu’s Square Word Calligraphy, was Xu’s rendition of a snippet from Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations (1953). The excerpt mainly concludes Wittgenstein’s argument against people perceiving the world through logic and analyzation, and the fact that diverse aspects of perception of this world compose the world we humans think we know, but at the same time these aspects are often the causes of confusion, denial, and disagreement. Xu provided a detailed translated print, from English to Square Word Calligraphy in the hallway next to the installation. Even so the text was small, and when the audiences discovered the work, they would not be able to read it anyhow. The actual purpose of this English text is not to be read carefully, and neither is the translated version, if it is the opposite, the threshold towards the art world that Xu is setting up will be too high. The purpose of the texts is to be known and acknowledged. Wittgenstein isn’t the one that is supposed to bring this argument to the audiences, Xu is. Xu is discovering this new angle of how to perceive the world, standing on Wittgenstein’s soap box.

And in what angle is Xu trying to perceive the world as? Xu himself did explained in his documentary of this work at the entrance of the exhibition. Within the museum space, the audiences are able to walk around all four floors and peek through small windows on the central atrium to observe the installation, from those different angles they will perceive the content of the text. Xu is playing a huge symbolism here, the only unchangeable element here is humans. If the windows are the perspectives we take when we receive and respond to information, and the texts are all the general information we take in everyday, then this miniatured little world of ours is squished inside this river side, plain white building. Also the viewpoints Xu took great consideration in is transferring a message. Since the museum only charge a general admission fee instead of separating the tickets for different shows, the audiences can see this artwork even when they don’t actually enter Xu’s show space. But when you as an audience actually decide to enter, the show will lead you to by far the clearest and most overwhelming viewpoint of the artwork, and explain to you how all of this that you are seeing, turn from thought to reality. So does every other thing we encounter in life, for sure you can observe something and judge it as a bystander, but when you feel like that thing is triggering your interest and you want to dig deeper, you might just discover another wonderful scape that suddenly jumped out from your blindspot. It could be a bit breathtaking, yes, but it is opening up its doors and pouring down information you wish to know. You might not grasp it quite as much, but when you stand inside of it, read the work and reflect. You might just get a sense of it. However, revealing a more or less painful fact, that at the end of the day, the text remains unreadable, for those who dug deeper still might not be able to master. For those who thought they knew but never really delve in, no matter how many angles they’ve took, they are still looking out from their own well. Taken from the quote from Socrates, the only thing that we know is that we don’t know, we might be always blocked away from truth by an impenetrable fog, with the question of does truth ever exist got brought up, over and over again though human history. 

Moving a bit closer to the work’s arrangement and artistic expression, the interconnection between the texts is also an interesting scene that Xu Bing play with. With the symbolism of the installation being the outgoing information that humans receive, the texts themselves written in English but in the form of Chinese, fundamentally creating a barrier of direct understanding and communication, leading to the idea of the world having an obstacle in exchanging message, which then leads to cultural and social differences, and further influence the building of individual identities. At the same time, each of the word themselves are arranged in the same dimension on a flat surface, when gravity pulls one down, the rest will follow. If one anecdote occurs, it must be cause by something before and will influence another after. Cultural-wise, since two cultures are already being represented in this work, there are thin threads that interconnects with each other that we bring inspiration and evaluation across the boundaries we set ourselves, politically and socially. Or from another perspective, the threads of inspiration and evaluation has already been infiltrated within our cultures that we have already been inseparable?

Overall it is an extremely enjoyable piece of work, which took me a whole afternoon to finish looking. Through its location, position and context. The only thing I wished the curation can be a bit better is the introduction film can be placed at the very end of the exhibition. A personal preference that I wish an official “reading” can come after the elaborative interpretations of the mind.