Xu Bing: You Inhuman Thing

The story of You Inhuman Thing is structured around verification tests, the common online systems that ask users to prove they are human. The work shows a frenetic sequence of video clips drawn from social media feeds, news broadcasts, films, satellite surveillance footage, wildlife documentaries, and video games. These tests ask us to decide whether the actions depicted in the clips are humane, ethical, or logical, subverting our assumptions about normal human behaviour.

The title You Inhuman Thing comes from a Chinese insult that describes someone as heartless or cold-blooded. Yet the work invites us to reconsider what it means to be human. As technology complicates seemingly simple value judgements, does our understanding of our own species remain valid?

Xu Bing explores themes of language, communication, and cultural misunderstanding in his work. You Inhuman Thing complements his new interactive web-based commission on the M+ website.

Xu Bing (b. 1955, Chongqing) is a visual artist and a professor at the Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing. A MacArthur Fellow, he is widely recognised as one of China’s leading conceptual artists. Throughout his career, he has expanded the boundaries of art, working across different media to question the act of image-making and its perception. He was the winner of the Artes Mundi Prize and received the Medal of Arts from the US Department of State. Xu’s work has been exhibited and collected by art institutions around the world, including M+.

Art at the Stair is an exhibition series featuring moving image art that connects with other works and exhibitions at M+.