Xu Bing at Jack Tilton and the New Museum

Born and educated in mainland China, Xu Bing mov to America in 1990 seeking greater artistic freedom after authorities in China cracked down in Tiananmen Square. Slowly he has gained recognition here, and he is now doing remarkably well: this past fall he had a triple vicinity in New York, with a solo exhibit at Jack Tilton and installations at the, novel Museum and at P.S. 1 where he participated in "Inside Out" the large exhibition of contemporary Chinese art there and at the Asia Society.

Tianshu (1987-91) shown at P 1 is the work for which Xu is best known. This remarkable installation of bourn volumes, hanging scrolls and wall body s entirely written in invented characters, already has a drawn out exhibition history in the States and elsewhere. It expresse Xu's regards with truth and appearances in agriculture which he has called "cultural lying." His interest in the surface of social practices, the way we attitude and mislead, was also evident in the sum of two units pieces he showed at Jack Tilton.

Giant Panda (1998) neared a blatant deception: two pigs wearing panda masks occupied a inscribe complete with bamboo, picturesque stones and a Ching Dynasty-style landscape against the wall. A plaque in forehead of the enclosure solemnly described the habits and endangered status of pandas, which number no more than a thousand in the wild. Inevitably, however, the scent of the pigs told a different story.

In a marvelous bit of chance, the pigs helped each other whirl off the masks during the show's opening. It's not hard to join masking with Xu's deeper concern: the difficulty of maintaining a Chinese identity in the Western world. The pseudoscientific body accompanying his ersatz pandas single highlighted the absurdity of a transparent practical crank but the humor implicitly pointed on the outside the genuine hardship facing those whose outward behavior may be at unevens with their sense of self Xu's stratagem makes us think about the interaction of place with identity. Late in the show's move swiftly he replaced the pigs with a monitor showing a video of them; this rejoinder to animal-rights activists who threatened to demonstrate complicated an already intricate presentation of verity and fiction.

In a smaller work at Tilton, Silkworm shield (1998), silkworms made filaments within the confines of an render free of access VCR, while a monitor showed a video that appeared to document their activity in real time. Actually, notwithstanding that the video was a complet work, finished before the opening. This kind of confusion could be called "technological lying." In Square Words (1994-96) a sharply ironic classroom installation at the novel Museum, participants practiced Chinese calligraphy alone to find themselves writing English words with Chinese-style Roman alphabetic characters In this piece, the material of language itself becomes a attitude As usual, Xu's irony makes his art the pair intellectually compelling and deeply enjoyable.

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