fine art ctiticism

Mass MoCA Showcases Chinese Contemporary Artist, Xu Bing

In 1995, the gallery of the Massachusetts College of Art presented Language Lost, a deconstruction of text and communication by Xu Bing. Seventeen years later Phoenix, two enormous, junk metal birds (left), are suspended in the vast space of Building Five of Mass MoCA. They will remain on view for the coming year.

Other elements of the exhibition include 1st Class, a faux tiger skin made of 500,000 cigarettes, and Background Story, a light box designed to look like a traditional scroll painting, but created from shadows cast by debris.

Xu (pronounced Shoo) Bing was born in Chongqing, Sichuan province, China, in 1955 and raised in Beijing. He studied Printmaking at the Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing, where he received an MFA in 1987. He subsequently taught at the Central Academy and is now its director. In 1990 he moved to the United States with a studio in Brooklyn, New York. artes fine arts magazineMore

New Haven’s Yale University Art Gallery Re-Opens after Extensive Renovation

A recent tour of the newly expanded and renovated Yale University Art Gallery, in New Haven Connecticut, has visitors treading on a little-noticed engraved marker inlayed in the stone floor of the Ancient Arts gallery. Cool winter light slants into the space from nearby Chapel Street, illuminating the inscription: ‘Col. JOHN TRUMBULL, Patriot and Artist, Friend and Aid (sic) of WASHINGTON, lies beside his wife beneath this GALLERY OF ART. Lebanon 1756 – New York 1843.’ Look on the back side of any hard-to-find two-dollar bill and you can find a representation of Trumbull’s famous 1817 masterpiece, The Declaration of Independence. Large-scale versions of several pieces from his Revolutionary War series found their way into Bullfinch-designed niches in the Capitol Rotunda in Washington, D.C. a decade later, but the smaller studies were eventually donated by a dispirited Trumbull to Yale University, after discovering, late in his life, that the American public had little appetite for history paintings, especially for events and personalities so recently transpired.