Thoughts on the Project from Xu Bing

Comments in 2005 After First Site Visit:

I chose to visit Kenya for its cultural and biological diversity. As a Chinese artist living in America, I take great interest in interactions between cultures. The fact that Kenya is home to more than fifty distinct tribes seized my interest. Kenya also supports thousands of species. I have used animals and plants in my work, and I longed to observe how these various animals live together in the wild.

After going on safari, visiting a number of official and scientific sites, and climbing Mount Kenya, I realized that trees always came up as the most fundamental topic. Ten days of travel and study brought three separate aspects of trees and the forest to my mind:

1. (Animals) The dissection of once-contiguous forest greenbelts has limited the animals’ freedom of movement and threatens their very survival.
2. (Water Resources) Logging has created soil erosion, thus drying up rivers and polluting lakes. This not only impacts the natural habitat of animals, but also harms the people of Kenya.
3. (Policy) How to treat and manage the forests is one of the most sensitive policy issues in Kenyan politics.

Project Proposal

Through art, culture, education, the involvement of local people, and the Internet, this project will create a system that allows funds earmarked for the planting of new trees to flow automatically and uninterruptedly from developed countries to Kenya. In the past, large companies, foundations, and generous individuals have made one-time, one-way donations. They give once, and the interaction is unidirectional. With this project, on the other hand, we seek to establish a self-sustaining system that links these two worlds symbiotically.

The preexisting educational system in Kenya will always play a fundamental role in teaching its children, the country’s future decision- and policymakers, about the value of the forests. Many in Kenya already understand the importance of the ecosystem. But the results of education are often only felt after years: an idea must take root, grow, and then bloom for it to result in change. We hope to use our art-based, education-based system to speed up the process of saving Kenya’s forests.

The income disparity between Kenya and more developed nations will be used as the foundation of this project. Two dollars is a pittance for many in the West, just enough for a one-way ride on the subway. But when used to purchase a piece of art created by a schoolchild in Kenya, it can be converted into ten newly planted trees. This disparity is the driving force behind this system, and will allow it to continue uninterrupted. I envision this system as one in which everyone involved—children, collectors, trees—will benefit.

First, we will need approximately five schools in Kenya to participate. I will create educational materials (guidebooks) for the students as a primer for creating their calligraphy. The book’s basic concept comes from the interrelationship of three Chinese pictographs, mu, lin, and sen. The first character, mu, means wood. When double it becomes lin, the word for woods or small forest. When one more mu is piled on top we have sen, or the word for dark or primeval forest.

My guidebook for the students will connect the written word, calligraphy, and art into one process. I believe that students will enjoy using different forms of writing from a variety of cultures to create images of trees. The use of words alone as a medium will limit the students, but these limitations are not unlike the rules of a game, which provide structure and form, and add fun and continuity. These educational materials will be very basic: they will provide information on the derivation of various written representations of the concept “tree.” I have included examples of the way in which Chinese, English, Japanese, and Arabic can be shaped into images.

During my second site visit I will teach the students from the selected schools how to integrate words and images into cohesive art. One thread will extend from the pictographs previously introduced; the second thread will be the treatment of trees in Egyptian hieroglyphs; a third strand will examine Romance language image-text; and, the final thread will extend from my previous work “Square Word Calligraphy” (this project involved creating a classroom setting in which children and adults could learn a new system of English/Chinese calligraphy that I had devised).

Selected schools will need to have Internet access. We will build a website to function as a platform for disseminating information, auctioning works by the students, and linking the participating schools. The students will use a unified paper format (numbered and bearing an insignia) to create their calligraphy. All of these materials will be accessible to the students online for download and will then be printed on local paper.

I will use the images that the children create as components of a larger work to be displayed in the museum. This has the benefit not only of increasing the value of the students’ work, but also of bringing attention to the project. I also feel that this will not be a one-time endeavor, but will be a medium that I will continue to work in as long as the system is in place.

In the museum or in a public space, a large monochrome LED video display will mark the progress of the system. Illuminated green patches on the board will represent swaths of unconnected forest. For each piece that is sold online another LED representation of the character mu will grow dot by dot outside of the preexisting patches.

This plan is ambitious; it will also require formal contacts with the Kenyan government, likely their Department of Education as well as the Kenya Forestry Department. Their support is crucial. Turning the money that is raised into trees is something that Rare itself may be able to help with.

The system and project that I have proposed is an experiment. If it works, then I hope it will be expandable across Kenya and perhaps to other countries. Another goal will be to minimize human labor to keep overhead low.