Mustard Seed Garden Landscape Scroll, Xu Bing, "The Section of Experimental Art at the 16th National Art Exhibition"

Painting Manual of the Mustard See Garden is a classic textbook for traditional Chinese painting, and it standardizes, calculates and summaries models of traditional Chinese painting methods for later followers, and it is a great summary of painting techniques. It represents the essence of Chinese painting, as it sets up the fundamental differences between Chinese and Western paintings.

In Chinese paintings, the relationship between writing and drawing is the one between signs and visual icons. Manual of the Mustard See Garden is a book that best illustrates this relationship. In the artist’s view, the Manual functions as a dictionary of painting, a collection of visual sign to describe the world.

From Painting Manual of the Mustard See Garden to the Mustard Seed Garden Landscape Scroll, the artist rewinds the steps. Shen Xinyou in the Qing dynasty extracts the typical style of masters into a book, while Xu Bing does the opposite; he puts these typical style models back to a landscape painting, like an inverse problem in mathematics. This experimentation might produce an unexpected result, but what interests the artist is that the pursuit deepens the understanding of the unique semiotic characteristics of Chinese art.