The Guardians by Julia Duato

The Guardians by Julia Duato

               A splendid pair of birds hang in the ceiling of the MoCA’s gigantic building. The Phoenixes. Each almost 100 feet long and nearly 12 tons each are clearly the most impressing thing you are going to find in the museum. As you walk in the enormous room where the phoenixes are located, giant wood cases is the first thing you can see, which adds a glimpse of intrigue and mystery to the whole situation. As you keep walking the two enormous, ferocious, gnarly birds with heads made from industrial metals and plastics, and feathers made of fabric and wires appear to your view as two immense nonsense structures for the first thirty seconds, and then the image of the two glorious Phoenixes appears in your mind both similar in size, structure, and colors. As you look closer and closer all the little details like the different materials and structures pop to your eyes. Both creatures ugly and magnificent at once, catch your eye from any angle or direction you are looking. From the back the shiny LED lights make them look like if they had come from out the space. From the front the two majestic phoenixes seems guardians of a kingdom, or a door to another world like in the movie The NeverEnding Story making you feel as small as an ant. 

From Rubble to Regality: Xu Bing's Phoenixes By Rebecca Wnuk

From Rubble to Regality: Xu Bing's Phoenixes By Rebecca Wnuk

            You won't see two glowing hundred-foot-long phoenixes floating in the air when you enter Building 5 of the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art, but the birds are there. It seems impossible to miss such large pieces, but viewing them requires walking through a mini maze of  bulky cardboard boxes stacked high enough to mask the avians' presence from unsuspecting viewers. The birds, hung from the ceiling, are part of Chinese artist Xu Bing's exhibit- appropriately titled Phoenix- and will be on display at Mass MOCA through October 2013. Together, they are a twenty-ton amalgamation of scrap metal and cultural vestiges created over a three-year period.

            The pieces are assembled from trash and debris found in building sites in Beijing, telling a story of China's never-ending development. The sheer volume and variety of individual parts used to make each bird is incredible: thousands of metal beams make up the birds' bodies, layered lines of rusty shovels give the impression of feathers, and carefully placed yellow hard hats add detail to the heads and feet. Each avian is also lined with small bulbs whose light creates a vivifying silhouette against the gallery's white interior.

            Despite the dirty, rigid, inorganic nature of the elements used to construct them, Xu Bing somehow manages to make the pair of phoenixes seem elegant and resolute. The wires that suspend them in midair are just long enough to let the birds dangle a few feet above viewers' heads, allowing for walking underneath them. Standing directly under such a massive work of art simultaneously instills feelings of extreme insignificance and unbridled vitality, leaving viewers with a vaguely perplexing aftertaste in their mouths.

            To call Xu Bing's phoenixes simply "sculptures" or "installations" would be to cruelly understate the rich cultural narrative embodied within them as well as their provocative, transcendental presence. The birds are visual mantras of China's continual development, tributes to a society of relentless progression. They are undoubtedly the most poignant works in all of Mass MOCA, and with more pieces being added to the show in April, Xu Bing: Phoenix is not an exhibit to miss.

MASS MoCA, review by Tommy Petroskey

                                                                                                

The Tobacco Project
by Tommy Petroskey

What do you get when you cross tiger skin with 500,000 cigarettes?  Xu Bing’s fantastically genius works of art of course!  Xu Bing is a Chinese artist who was born in 1955 and lived through countless historical Chinese events, including the Cultural Revolution.  It wasn’t until 2004 when Xu Bing started his Tobacco Project to try to relate human issues to symbolic forms of his art.  In 2011 Bing finally made his masterpiece in the Tobacco Project, the tiger-skin rug made up of half a million cigarettes.

Throughout the Tobacco Project Xu Bing had been poking at the idea that cigarettes are the death of us, however, the tiger skin rug was the best possible symbol to his main idea.  The piece astonished me at first.  Never had I seen anything like it.  Not only did the quantity of the piece overwhelm me but also the creativeness of positioning the cigarettes to produce shading and different colors.  I had so many questions about the piece the second I laid my eyes on it.  How was it made?  What was his motivation?  What does it mean?  How are all the cigarettes staying together?  How many cigarettes are there? And the list went on.  Xu Bing did such an incredible job with this work of art I could not find anything I didn’t like about it.  In fact I was looking to find something I didn’t like about it, and I did not find one single thing.  The piece was assembled on the floor in Mass MoCA, (Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art) meaning I could walk 360 degrees around it for the full affect.  Given that the cigarettes were positioned just so, on the opposite side of piece appeared the tobacco rolled inside each cigarette.  This was my favorite aspect of the piece because this affect changed the color of the tiger skin from the traditional orange and white to brownish black and white just by looking at it from a different angle.  Xu Bing’s fantastic work does an incredible job of capturing the essence of human addictions and eccentric design and creativity.  This exhibit left me fascinated for hours afterwards and would highly recommend experiencing some of Bing’s artwork in the near future.                  

MASS MoCA, review by Kara L'Heureux

The Flight of Phoenixes

By Kara L’Heureux

Boxes tower high concealing the large hall, and what lies behind is a mystery. Slowly you enter the pathway maze of boxes and as you approach the end around the corner you can’t help but feel excitement and the suspense of what lies behind. As you turn the corner you look up and see them in all their glory. The barren factory hall is now the sky, and in the sky flies two mammoth creatures. Two phoenixes created by Xu Bing are 27 and 28 yards long. Amid flight one Phoenix follows the other; they are colossal, graceful and beautiful.

These birds are made entirely of construction site materials: hard helmets, shovels, rods, beams, wheels, and machine parts now are covered in small light blue lights. Walking from one end of the bird to the other, under and in between you see the details of every object that makes up these birds. The Phoenixes are unique but similar in most construction. No object is out of place and every attachment to the birds truly does make them look like actual creatures. Even though the birds are mechanical looking they still maintain realness in their texture and form as they fly.

This exhibit allows you to get up close to the birds and stand just beneath them. Staring up from underneath you can see a star light night sky made up of all the tiny lights places all over the bird’s wings, feathers, and body. While exploring you will also see a long counter of pictures. The pictures show the proses of creating these
 birds. Xu Bing is in many of these photos and you can see the steps he took from the very beginning of the idea to the end finished project. Captions below the pictures guide the images like a time line tell thing the story of why Xu Bing created these birds.

Like something out of a dream world these Phoenixes inspire wonder and questions about how the birds are even hung from the ceiling. You can’t help but spend a while just staring up at the Phoenixes in the sky.. Xu Bings sculptures transform the once barren hall into the sky.  You will feel small bellow but you will also feel as if you are flying along with the birds.