XU Tan

Man wearing a gray shirt smiling for a picture

Artist

XU Tan is an artist who currently lives and works in Shenzhen, China and New Jersey, US. XU attended the Guangzhou Academy of Fine Arts, where he received his BA in 1983 and then his MA degree in oil painting in 1989. In 1993, XU became a member of the Big Tail Elephant Group, participating in the group’s exhibitions from 1992 to 1996 in Guangzhou, and in 1998 in Bern.

The Big Tail Elephant Group is an artist collective founded in 1990 by LIN Yilin, CHEN Shaoxiong, and LIANG Juhui and later joined by XU. The group formed in Guangzhou, China, with an interest in urban development and the rapid transformation of modern cities, Guangzhou being among the earliest cities in China to undergo this shift. While XU’s formal background is in painting, he works in many mediums including video, performance, and installation. XU’s work concerns cultural and social change and often incorporates text and image. For example, XU’s recent project “Keywords School” is a mobile project collecting cultural “keywords,” both in China and abroad and engaging in participatory models. Another project, “Social Botany,” is a social research project about the relations between the human and botanical world. XU has been a recipient of the Fellowship of Asia Culture Council (Rockefeller Foundation), New York in 2002 and the Fellowship of DAAD in Berlin, Germany in 2004.

Some of his group exhibitions include: Another Long March: Chinese Conceptual Art (1997), Breda, The Netherlands; Big Tail Elephant (1998) at Kunsthalle Bern, Bern, Switzerland; Inside Out: New Chinese Art (1998) at P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center, New York, USA; Taipei Biennial (1998), Taipei, Taiwan; Second Berlin Biennial (2001), Berlin, Germany; 50th and 53rd Venice Biennale (2003, 2009), Venice, Italy; the Second Guangzhou Triennial (2005), Guangzhou, China; 14th Shanghai Biennial (2014) Shanghai, China; and the twelfth Sharjah Biennial (2015), United Arab Emirates.

XU’s solo exhibitions include: Keywords School (2008) at Bonniers Konsthall, Stockholm, Sweden; Searching for Keywords, Location One, New York; Air is Good (2005) at DAAD Gallery, Berlin, Germany; Keywords School at YBCA (2009) at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco, California; and Xu Tan: Questions, Soil and ‘Socio-Botanic’ (2013) at the Vitamin Creative Space, Guangzhou, China.