Prof. Xu Bing was born in Chongqing, China in 1955 and raised in Beijing. He received his MFA from China Central Academy of Fine Arts in 1987. He moved to USA in 1990 and returned to Beijing in 2008, where he was appointed Vice President of China Central Academy of Fine Arts.

Prof. Xu is an internationally renowned artist. His works "Book from the Sky" were displayed at the China Art Gallery in 1989 and subsequently shown in many other art exhibitions worldwide, attracting attention and discussions among art critics inside and outside China. The book "The Art of Xu Bing: Words Without Meaning, Meaning Without Words" was published by the University of Washington Press in 2001. A collection of critical essays about his works was published as "Persistence/Transformation: Text as Image in the Art of Xu Bing" by the Princeton University Press in 2006.

Prof. Xu received the prestigious MacArthur Award in 1999 and the Fukuoka Asian Culture Prize in 2003. He was the first winner of the Artes Mundi Prize, awarded in 2004, with his installation "Where does the dust collect itself?". His recent works based on Chinese calligraphy named were shown in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York and the "Book from the Ground" was displayed in interactive new media format at the Museum of Modern Art, New York. In 2006, he received the Lifetime Achievement Award from the Southern Graphics Council.