Xu Bing

Xu Bing was born in 1955 in Chongqing, China. During the Cultural Revolution he was sent to the countryside in 1975 as part of the era's rustication policies, returning to Beijing in 1977. He enrolled at the Central Academy of Fine Arts (CAFA) in Beijing, earning a BA in printmaking in 1981 and an MFA in 1987.

Xu Bing rose to international attention in the late 1980s with Book from the Sky (Tianshu), a monumental installation of printed scrolls and books filled with thousands of invented characters that resemble Chinese but carry no actual meaning. He moved to the United States in 1990 and has since divided his time between Beijing and New York. He served as vice president of the Central Academy of Fine Arts from 2008 to 2014, and has headed the Academy's Academic Committee since 2014, roles that placed him at the center of Chinese art education while he continued to exhibit internationally. His later Phoenix Project, two enormous bird sculptures built from construction debris and industrial scrap salvaged from Beijing worksites, has been shown at MASS MoCA, the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in New York, and the Arsenale at the Venice Biennale.

As of this writing (2026-07-10), Xu Bing is living and continues to work and exhibit, dividing his time between Beijing and New York.

Xu Bing's reputation rests on institutions and prize committees rather than a single dominant critical voice. The MacArthur Foundation's 1999 fellowship citation praised his "originality, creativity, self-direction, and capacity to contribute importantly to society, particularly in print-making and calligraphy." The Southern Graphics Council, awarding him a lifetime achievement prize, credited his "use of text, language and books" with having "impacted the dialogue of the print and art worlds in significant ways." His work is consistently framed by museums and critics as a bridge between Chinese and Western visual and linguistic traditions, using the physical craft of printmaking and calligraphy to probe how meaning is made and lost in translation.

Xu Bing's market is built primarily on prints, with Artprice and Artnet recording several hundred auction results for the artist, the large majority of which are works on paper rather than major installations. Public data on his highest auction result is thin and inconsistent: MutualArt reports realized prices up to about USD 1.22 million for installation works and about USD 1.20 million for paintings, without naming the specific work, auction house, or sale date. A separate database lists an unverified auction record of about USD 12.6 million for the artist; this figure could not be corroborated against other sources and should not be treated as confirmed. Separately, his Phoenix Project commission was reported at approximately RMB 200 million (about USD 2.93 million), arranged privately through the Ravenel auction house's advisory arm and collector Barry Lam; this was a private transaction rather than a public auction sale and should not be read as an auction record.

There is no confirmed published catalogue raisonne for Xu Bing, so provenance and studio or gallery confirmation carry extra weight when evaluating a work. His public auction record is comparatively thin and dominated by prints and editions rather than the large installations for which he is best known institutionally, which means headline sale prices should be read in the context of medium and scale rather than treated as representative of his overall market. No source available confirms a single reliable all-time auction record for Xu Bing, including the specific work, auction house, or sale date, so collectors should treat any headline sale figure for this artist as directional rather than fully documented.