The Cleveland Museum of Art

Collection Online as of April 25, 2024

Moving Cloud (Yi-yun), from Series of Repetitions

Moving Cloud (Yi-yun), from Series of Repetitions

1985
(Chinese, b. 1955)
Image: 51.9 x 71.6 cm (20 7/16 x 28 3/16 in.); Sheet: 73.5 x 81.6 cm (28 15/16 x 32 1/8 in.)
Location: not on view

Did You Know?

The viewer looks down on a cloud floating over the patterned fields of a rural landscape.

Description

Xu created five Series of Repetitions to explore the process of printmaking. He printed images of the series in different stages, each time carving away a little bit more of the block’s surface. The first print is the darkest; the final one is the lightest with the image being entirely effaced. This print represents a stage in the process when the image was most legible. Some prints show Chinese characters, indications for his later works featuring writing and language called “landscripts”—images made with script.

As a child, Xu had access to a world of books: his mother worked in the library and his father in the history department at Peking University. Toward the end of the Cultural Revolution in 1974, Xu was sent to a rural village north of Beijing for “re-education.” The Cultural Revolution taught him the power of words and text, while the interruption of his formal schooling gave him time to practice writing and teach himself woodcut techniques.
  • ?–2010
    (Booklyn Artists Alliance, Brooklyn, NY, sold to the Cleveland Museum of Art)
    2010–
    The Cleveland Museum of Art, Cleveland, OH
  • Impressionism to Modernism: The Keithley Collection. The Cleveland Museum of Art, Cleveland, OH (organizer) (September 11, 2022-January 8, 2023).
  • {{cite web|title=Moving Cloud (Yi-yun), from Series of Repetitions|url=false|author=Xu Bing|year=1985|access-date=25 April 2024|publisher=Cleveland Museum of Art}}

Source URL:

https://www.clevelandart.org/art/2010.152