The Department of History of Art and the Institute for Chinese Studies were thrilled to welcome the conceptual artist and MacArthur fellow Xu Bing back to OSU on March 9, 2023. His well-attended talk on his creative method was richly illustrated with photos and videos of his extraordinary artwork, and serious reflections on the nature of art and society were tempered with appealing irony and good humor.  Particularly after the three-year pandemic hiatus in international travel, it was exciting to see so much of his new work. Delivered in Mandarin, alternating with English translation by Yifan Li, the lecture captivated the audience for almost two hours. 

Faculty, graduate students and local artists enjoyed informal discussions with him during the visit and he made himself available to graduate student Keyu Yan for discussions related to his dissertation research. 

Before his lecture, he returned to the Wexner Center for the Arts, where he was one of four artists in the 1993 exhibition Fragmented Memory, one of the earliest showings of Chinese installation art in the U.S.  He recalled the experience of working in the irregularly shaped galleries of the Wex in 1993 as stimulating new ideas about space in his art.  He also visited an open house for artists’ books at the Fine Arts Library, where two of his pieces were on display.  On March 10, before returning to New York, he also took time to view the two compelling special exhibitions at the Billy Ireland Cartoon Museum.