In response to his own Book from the Sky, a work dated 30 years earlier whose language is illegible to anyone, Book from the Ground is legible to all. When reading Square Word Calligraphy, such feeling is joyfully resolved with the sudden revelation that the work does contain “real” text. A few fiends of mine and I uickly eached an ageement that the su veillance came a footage has been teibly 20 ... ‘Dragonfly Eyes’ is a fictional movie accomplished without a single actor or cameraman. Regained. 3 Min Read. Where are the found stories in a world of constant surveillance? It’s night-time, and the person walks unsteadily, weaving from left to right, as if drunk, or maybe just tired. An artistic response to this form of the surveillance society and the desire to infinitely better its operation through a compound vision is acclaimed Chinese artist Xu Bing’s Dragonfly Eyes … Dragonfly Eyes. Firstly, original concepts in Xu Bing’s artistic career; secondly, issues and theoretical viewpoints that appear frequently in the numerous reviews on Dragonfly Eyes; thirdly, specific concepts and methods in the production process of Dragonfly Eyes. Xu Bing, Still from Dragonfly Eyes, 2015. Medium: Mixed media installation/ ink rubbings on paper with stones and soil, Dimension: Central part approx. Since 2015, surveillance cameras in China have been linked to the cloud database: countless surveillance recordings have been streamed online. A solitary figure is walking away from the camera, along the edge of what appears to be a lake or small reservoir. He collected a huge amount of material, and tailored them together to tell a story. From this single grid, one can discern nearly 4,000 separate poems. Professor Xu Bing resides both in the US (since 1990) and Beijing, where he served as Vice President of China’s Central Academy of Fine Arts (CAFA). Tuesday 10/16/18. The plainness, simplicity, and naivete of these works, made just after the end of the Cultural Revolution, are a stark contrast to the false, grandiose, empty forms of that era. Xu paired the salvaged paintings with a ''profoundly deep'' article by a critic interpreting the abstract paintings of the renowned artist Jonathan Lasker. Deep Focus. 3 Min Read. Many early viewers pored over the artwork, obsessively looking for real characters. In China, a country with strict film censorship, an estimated 200 million such cameras have been installed to capture life unfiltered; mundane daily activities are mixed with dramatic events beyond the … In this installation Xu Bing uses dust that he collected from the streets of lower-Manhattan in the aftermath of September 11th. Like a linguistic breeder, the artist combines Chinese calligraphy with English writing to create a new “species.” However, it is different from the nonsense characters in Book From the Sky, which give the viewer a feeling of hesitation, suspicion, and confusion. The work transforms the Great Wall into a paper edition of itself by shedding its history and context, hinting at ironies of isolationism, migration, and various cultural legacies. In China, a country with strict film censorship, an estimated 200 million such cameras have been installed to capture life unfiltered; mundane daily activities are mixed with dramatic events … Dragonfly Eyes. Video, surveillance camera footage taken from public live-streaming websites. Dragonfly Eyes. This four-volume treatise, produced over four years, was made with thousands of meaningless characters that look like Chinese, each designed by the artist in a Song-style font that was standardized by artisans in the Ming dynasty. Dragonfly Eyes. This was the last major artwork that the artist started before moving to the United States in 1990, where it was exhibited for the first time. PLAYING AT YALE BEFORE A ONE-WEEK BOOKING AT THE MUSEUM OF MODERN ART. Xu Bing is interested in reflecting on the problems and weaknesses of humanity by exploring the long and entangled relationship between humans and tobacco. Essentially, New English Calligraphy is a fusion of written English and written Chinese. By Robert Koehler In Cinema Scope Online, TIFF 2017. Above all, the film reminds us that even in our most intimate moments we are being watched. Once they are seated at the desks, the audience is instructed to take up their brushes and the lesson in New English Calligraphy begins. Artist Xu Bing's first feature film "Dragonfly Eyes" tells a story of love and obsession through footage culled entirely from videos uploaded … China has long had a tradition that “calligraphy and painting have the same origins.” Xu Bing’s Landscript, landscape-in-script, transformed the visual images of landscapes to linguistic forms, inviting the viewer to reassess the particularity of Chinese culture hidden in landscape paintings and providing a unique way to “read a scene.”, Location: Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1999; Victoria and Albert Musum, London, 2001. 2017. The debut feature by Chinese artist Xu Bing, a Chinese artist known for his printmaking and installations, was made from 10,000 hours of public accessible surveillance camera recordings. Desks are arranged with small containers of ink, brushes and a copybook with instructions on the basic principles of ''New English Calligraphy,'' a writing system invented and designed by the artist. The colorful, shimmering imagery of the installation imparts a magical, fairy-tale like quality. For his first feature film, Xu Bing edited footage from surveillance cameras into a fictional story. I’ve wanted to make a film from surveillance footage since 2013, but I had no access to the necessary resources. There are around 150 pocket-sized works in this set of woodblock prints. Later in the same year, he organized his personal views on printmaking and creative insights into an essay entitled “A New Exploration and Reconsideration of Pictorial Multiplicity.” In it, he wrote, “Multiple, prescribed impressions are the crucial element that differentiates printmaking from other fine arts, and it is only by following this line of inquiry that one can seek out printmaking’s essence.” This set of works represents an experiment in the artistic qualities that make prints unique. With poet Zhai Yongming and screenwriter Zhang Hanyi he weaves a story involving two characters around these images. When these seemingly random yet intricately connected clips are assembled, what's the distance between the video fragments of real life and 'reality'? When these seemingly random yet intricately connected clips are assembled, what's the distance between the video fragments of real life and 'reality'? The absolute directness of this undertaking produces a result that is both unthinkable and worth thinking about. ''Wu'' in Chinese has various meanings, including both ''misunderstanding'' and ''enlightenment'' in the Chan (Zen) sense. The dust was applied to the floor with a leaf blower and allowed 24 hours to settle. So I took up the project again. He weaves a story of a boy and a girl in modern-day China out of security camera footage. As Xu Bing has noted, the false characters “seem to upset intellectuals,” inspiring doubt in received systems of knowledge. He is currently an A.D. White Professor-at-Large at Cornell University. China. Dragonfly Eyes – An Interview with Xu Bing November 17, 2017 By Jeremy Elphick | Locarno Film Festival Interviews An obsession with language, symbols, words – how they structure meaning, value, and communication – has long been a central focus for the Beijing-based visual artist Xu Bing. “This is a man. Xu Bing / Dragonfly Eyes: What Counts as Art Today? 2017. Dragonfly Eyes. As people attempt to recognize and write these words, some of the thinking patterns that have been ingrained in them since they learned to read are challenged. It is an expression of Xu Bing’s long-standing vision of a universal language. Thereby into the Western cultural sphere was written a brand new, Eastern art form. From Frye Art Museum, Xu Bing 徐冰, Still from Dragonfly Eyes (Trailer) (2015), Single-channel digital video Due to the universality of its visual language, it could be published anywhere without translation. Dragonfly Eyes 2017 directed by Xu Bing. This by turns shocking and poetic, but always fascinating, experiment reflects on our obsessive visual culture. DCP. This dichotomy between understanding and misunderstanding is integral to ''Wu Street.'' Xu Bing’s Dragonfly Eyes and A Deconstructive Trip of Film Viewing hao ong Hua When the film finished and the c edits stated olling on the sc een, I immediately felt that this could ha dly be called a good film. The highly acclaimed Chinese artist Xu Bing created the movie Dragonfly Eyes out of thousands of hours of footage from surveillance cameras and live-streaming sites. Xu Bing states: ''These two creatures, devoid of human consciousness, yet carrying on their bodies the marks of human civilization, engage in the most primal form of 'social intercourse.' In Mandarin; English subtitles. Dragonfly Eyes (Trailer) constructs a narrative from seemingly unrelated fragments of reality to reveal what cannot be seen by the naked eye. Ineffably silent, these cameras record incessantly. The entire mark-making process is then transferred onto a ten-meter-long stretch of bark paper. It implies the way that Chinese people see and approach things, and why China is the way it is today – developing at this breakneck speed but not in line with the Western value system. The idea for this installation came from a Chinese saying “monkeys grasp the moon” which alludes to an old folk tale about a group of monkeys who tried to capture the moon. The artist, known for his experimental calligraphy and bookbinding art, is one of the most important representatives of contemporary Chinese art. Reflective also of the artist's personal conviction that Mao's concept of art for the people is universally relevant; the work exemplifies the way in which Xu integrates his particular cultural background and life experience into the international context of contemporary art. The artist, known for his experimental calligraphy and bookbinding art, is one of the most important representatives of contemporary Chinese art. But in fact the result was just the opposite: the pigs themselves were completely unfazed, and blithely ignoring their human onlookers pursued their lovemaking with great gusto. All of these special characteristics could be said to have a deep connection to the Chinese way of writing characters. I collected a huge amount of footage and tried to use these fragments of reality to tell a story. He begins by printing an uncut block of wood, making a sequence of prints as he carves until the image is entirely effaced. 31(L) x 6(W) m; Side part approx. It thus serves as an intermediary form of communication and exchange between the two languages. DRAGONFLY EYES is an 81-minute fictional film made entirely out of surveillance footage. In the work, Xu Bing references the fine whitish-grey film that covered downtown New York in the weeks following 9-11, and recreates a field of dust across the gallery floor that is punctuated by the outline of a Zen Buddhist poem, revealed as if the letters have been removed from under the layer: In the work Xu Bing discusses the relationship between the material world and the spiritual world, exploring the complicated circumstances created by different world perspectives. Actually, the theme of surveillance cameras has a very long and rich cinematic history, … Artist Xu Bing uses post-production processing to spruce the footage up, frequently labelling the … Xu Bing’s studio also made a character database software that corresponds to the language of the book. So I took up the project again. Chinese artist Xu Bing compiled his directorial debut from thousands of hours of footage from security cameras. He also added a textbook, an instructional video, and a practice sheet just like those used in classroom settings. Film Screening + Artist Talk Wednesday, March 7 7PM Bartos Theatre (e15-070) Dragonfly Eyes is an 81-minute fictional movie, made entirely out of surveillance footage. Sometimes they record images that are beyond logical understanding, captured in one mad, fleeting instant. Xu Bing, Still from Dragonfly Eyes, 2015. Established notions of Chinese and English no longer retain, and perceptual norms are reset, marking the new potentials that challenge the foundation of cognition itself. Xu Bing. That the work was born “in-transit” gives it an extra layer of meaning: “Those American printers were shocked by the piece’s size,” Xu noted. And the way we experience them isn’t just the stuff of comic book art, but the essence of life itself, according to Scott McCloud. The Harvard Film Archive is pleased to present XU BING’S DRAGONFLY EYES on Monday October 15, 2018 before a Radcliffe lecture by the filmmaker on Tuesday October 16. Users can enter words either in English or in Chinese, and the program will translate them into Xu Bing's lexicon of signs. Panos Kotzathanasis panos.kotzathanasis pkotzathanasis PKotzathanasis. The book is written in a way that any reader, regardless of his or her cultural or educational background, can understand. Andrea Lingenfelter reviews Dragonfly Eyes, a film by Xu Bing A grainy black and white long shot, filmed from a high angle. IFFR 2018. The work is mainly comprised of over 400 calligraphic variants of the Chinese character “niao”, meaning bird, carved in colored acrylic and laid out in a shimmering track that rises from the floor into the air. Xu Bing / Dragonfly Eyes: What Counts as Art Today? The title Ghost Pounding the Wall is translated from Gui Da Qiang (“a wall built by ghosts”), a Chinese aphorism meaning to be stuck in one’s own thinking, refering to a story of a man trapped behind labyrinthine walls built by ghosts. Xu Bing, prominent printmaker, installation artist and filmmaker will screen his film Dragonfly Eyes, developed entirely from surveillance footage. The heroes of the story are Qing Ting and Ke Fan, which are played by different, unsuspected individuals who have been caught on surveillance cameras. I believe that a core characteristic of Chinese painting is its schematized nature, which is reflected in classic literature, theatrical expression, and various methods of social production. XU BING is a Chinese-born artist whose artistic and cultural interventions touch on the fields of public and … Dragonfly Eyes. Each of us is captured on surveillance cameras, on average, 300 times a day. Prominent visual artist Xu Bing’s first feature film is composed solely of footage from China’s millions of surveillance cameras, altering viewers’ concepts of reality and showing them just how often they are being watched For the Book fom the Ground installation, Xu Bing recreated his studio's working environment and brought some materials to the exhibition space, implying that this is a never-ending project in progress. They are characteristic of a certain style in Xu Bing’s early works, and they can be seen as a starting point in his artistic inspiration. This progression, from nothing to something to nothing again, anticipates the artist’s desire, stated later in his career, to “make something useless”—to push the medium of woodcutting, and the “usefulness” of figurative arts, into new territory. The nine “keywords” of “World Picture” can be generally divided into three categories and sources. Everyone in China who has received basic education must, over the course of years, commit to memorize and then write and re-write thousands of characters, each character a drawing. Facebook Twitter Reddit. Medium: Performance, mixed media installation / Ink and live pigs, When this work was initially performed in Beijing, it revealed an unexpected and surprising dynamic between the spectators and the spectacle. Dragonfly Eyes is Xu Bing’s feature film debut. Materials: Performance media installation with live animal / Live Pig, books, mannequin, wood blocks, ink. I collected a huge amount of footage and tried to use these fragments of reality to tell a story. Qing Ting leaves her life as a novice in a Buddhist temple for the secular world: from a highly mechanized dairy farm to a dry … The Foolish Old Man Who Tried to Remove ... Book  from  the  Ground  -  Studio  Installation, Background  Story:  Landscape  After  Huang  Gongwang, Background  Story:  Returning  Late  from  a  Spring  Outing, Background  Story:  Dwelling  in  the  Peach  Blossom  Valley, Background  Story:  Spring  Clouds  and  Layered  Peaks, Background  Story  -  Old  Trees,  Level  Distance, Background  Story:  Landscape  Painted  on  the  Double  Ninth  Festival, Background  Story:  Blue  and  Green  Landscape, Background  Story:  Landscape  after  Wu  Zhen, Background  Story:  Shangfang  Temple  Scroll, Square  Word  Calligraphy:  Three  Indonesian  Proverbs, Square  Word  Calligraphy:  El  bon  poble, An  introduction  to  Square  Word  Calligraphy, Landscripts  from  the  Himalayan  Journal, American  Silkworm  Series  4:  Silkworm  VCR, American  Silkworm  Series  3:  The  Opening, American  Silkworm  Series  1:  Silkworm  Books, A  Case  Study  of  Transference:  Times  Overlap. The project began in 1999 in Durham, home of the Duke family; passed through Shanghai in 2004; and in 2011 extended once more to Virginia — locations closely intertwined with tobacco. Xu Bing is a world-renowned artist working at the forefront of Chinese and global contemporary art. The title of this work refers to the Chinese name of a Manhattan street located on the Lower East Side. Comprised of countless seemingly random but actually casually related film clips, [3] Dragonfly Eyes is a feature film almost entirely comprised of surveillance footage taken from China's extensive network of CCTV cameras. 13(H) x 14(W) m each. Landscript, as the title suggests, is “pictures” that Xu Bing intentionally made with “script.”  This project started when the artist went to the Himalayas in Nepal in 1999 and sketched “scenes” with Chinese characters. For Square Word Calligraphy, Xu Bing designs a calligraphic system in which English words come to resemble Chinese characters. Video, surveillance camera footage taken from public live-streaming websites. Indistint forms of plants and stones can be discerned through frosted glass. The work won the inaugural Artes Mundi Prize, the Wales International Visual Art Prize in 2004 and was later shown at various venues across the world. Few images come closer to reality than those recorded by surveillance cameras. In 1620 Hui Su created a grid of 841 characters that can be read in any number of directions and combinations. From Frye Art Museum, Xu Bing 徐冰, Dragonfly Eyes Poster (2015), Digital Print It is only when we try to find out what is beneath the surface that we can discover the background, and everything becomes intertwined in the image. His previous art work, such as Book From the Sky, earned him international acclaim. 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