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"NEW YORK\u2014As vice president of the Central Academy of Fine Arts&amp;nbsp;(CAFA) in Beijing, conceptual Chinese artist Xu Bing is the patrician dean of China\u2019s art world. His work is incisive and thought-driven; iconic works like \u201CBook From the Sky\u201D and \u201CThe Living Word\u201D play aesthetic games with the pictograms of the Chinese language. Yet, as he explains, Xu\u2019s background is anything but Ivory Tower. He grew up during the Cultural Revolution, and in 1975 was sent to the countryside to work as a farmer.Xu recalls that his desire to create art endured through that difficult time. After the Cultural Revolution, the artist was one of the first students to reenter China\u2019s growing art education system, and became part of CAFA\u2019s printmaking staff upon graduation. He moved to New York in 1992, rooming with Ai Weiwei in an East Village basement before taking up residence in Williamsburg, where he currently has a home and studio converted from an old bakery. The cavernous stone oven left over from the building\u2019s previous use forms a sunken pit that he has taken over as an office.On the occasion of his \u201CTobacco Project\u201D exhibition at the Aldrich Museum, ARTINFO sat down with Xu Bing to discuss how he became an artist despite political challenges, the inspiration he took from New York\u2019s tumultuous art scene, and his latest projects.&amp;nbsp;"^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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