The installation featured two monumental birds, named Feng and Huang, fabricated entirely from materials harvested from construction sites in urban China, including demolition debris, steel beams, tools, and remnants of the daily lives of migrant laborers. According to Xu bing’s website, “while Feng Huang are traditionally associated with rebirth after suffering and rising from ash, Xu Bing’s Phoenix can be seen to signify the cycle of the painstaking development and renewal that is inherent in the process of urbanization. Xu is a Chan Buddhist scholar who interweaves Buddhist sensibility, ideas, and tradition into his art work.
According to art scholar Kori Lisa Yee Litt, Xu Bing’s larger goal is to “encourage sudden enlightenment by presenting his viewers with an artistic example of a kōan. A kōan is a Chan Buddhist meditational exercise that raises issues about life and existence that cannot be understood or resolved in any rational way. It confounds the habits of routine thought, and only through meditation can a student achieve the answer, thereby reaching an enlightened state. Xu Bing describes one famous kōan experience as follows:
…the student [asks], “What is Buddha?” The Zen master replies, “Three bushels
of hemp.” In pondering how the Buddha can possibly be “three bushels of hemp,”
the student’s thought processes fall into a great empty space, without any kind of
support or foundation. Then one day he breaks through to enlightenment with the
realization that the essence of Buddha exists in every moment and every aspect of
life. The Zen approach to enlightenment forces you to open up your mind in the
midst of something that completely goes against logic and common sense—in this
way one achieves wisdom.”
Phoenix: Xu Bing was on view at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine on SATURDAY, MARCH 1, 2014, 9 AM – 4 PM, CATHEDRAL Redeemer’s Center for Faith and Work produced the video for its 2013 conference in order “to help illustrate the concept of ‘Humanizing Work'”
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