Illustration by Maria Manhattan
Xu Bing was born in Chongqing, China in 1955 and grew up in Beijing. He grew up in China during the Cultural Revolution, when he and other children were sent off to camps to learn a new culture and language, different from their parents. In his home, his mother, a librarian and his father, a professor, had many books that he could not read. His father was strict and made him copy classical Chinese characters every day. He found this difficult and as a result of his intense relationship with language, Xu Bing is famous for creating art from and about written communication.
