The human brain is really very lazy,” says the artist Xu Bing, sitting in the London gallery where the first British show of his work is about to open. Xu’s artwork is designed to jump-start the human brain. He wants us to reject preconceived expectations and to get our sluggish brain cells leaping and darting along new mental avenues.

His work at first glance looks like ancient Chinese calligraphy, inscribed in neat, rapid strokes with brush and ink in immaculate lines to be read from top to bottom. On closer inspection, however, in each ostensibly Chinese character you can make out an English word. These are not Chinese characters at all. In the early 1990s, Xu (pronounced “shoe”) spent two years designing and building a new writing system that allowed him to create English words drawn in the style of Chinese pictograms.

“We have such fixed thinking patterns, it takes people a while to adjust and reorder the way they think. It’s interesting how different people react. I’ve found that highly educated people take the longest time to work out how to read these. Children catch on fastest.”

Xu has recently been lured back to China from the United States, where he has been living and working for 18 years, to become vice-president of the Central Academy of Arts in Beijing, the best-regarded art school in China. He has joined during a period of rapid change as the school reacts to the world boom in demand for Chinese art.

“When I recently rejoined the Chinese art community, I found that people are actually very daring, and prepared to experiment.

“It is very advanced in this field. China itself is a big laboratory now for different cultures and, partly for this reason, it is the most appropriate place in the world for contemporary art.”

Passing through London for 12 hours, having judged the Artes Mundi prize in Cardiff, Xu talks about his experiences in the turbulence of the Cultural Revolution.

“My father was the head of the history department at Beijing University at the time, and my mother was working in the library. Politically, Beijing University was a sensitive place. My father, as an intellectual, was classified as an enemy of the people. As his son, aged about 12, the implication was that I, too, was an enemy. But I wanted to show I could contribute to society, so I worked very hard. There was a slogan: ‘Pick up your pen as a weapon and fight against capitalists and antirevolutionaries. If you can write and draw, then that is your weapon.’ I got involved in propaganda, doing calligraphy for revolutionary posters.”

Xu’s father was denounced and forced to wear a dunce’s hat as part of his ritual humiliation. “But he had the wit to collect his high hats when he was humiliated at meetings. Afterwards he would walk home still wearing the hat, and he would keep it, in a collection.”

Xu found the conflict between his father’s status and his own zealous work on behalf of the revolutionaries difficult to reconcile. “I couldn’t understand why my father would be classified as an enemy of the country. I know it was only because he was at the university, but it was hard to accept. Also, I was fighting against the class of enemies of the people. I was not fighting my father directly. It was nothing personal.”

Later, Xu was sent to the countryside as Mao decreed that educated youths must work in the fields. “For three years in my late teens I became a peasant, working on the land in a very poor, remote mountain area in the north of China. But it was so interesting for me because the villagers had retained ancient Chinese traditions. It gave me a chance to learn something about real traditional Chinese culture.”

Xu worked hard in the fields. It was viciously cold in winter and there was no coal. “If you wanted to cut up meat or vegetables, you had to use a cleaver because they were always frozen. If you wanted water from the basin inside, you had to break the ice first . . . actually it was probably the sweetest time of my life. The peasants didn’t seem to care what my background was as long as I worked hard and behaved well. I was close to nature and I was learning about Chinese culture untainted by recent politics.”

In 1976, as the Cultural Revolution was drawing to a close with the arrest of the Gang of Four, Xu won a place at the Central Academy of Fine Art. He studied drawing and print-making, graduated in 1981 and joined the staff, teaching traditional European drawing. He was still there at the time of the Tiananmen Square uprising in 1989. “I felt very worried because all my students were involved in the democratic movement. Our faculty was one of the nearest to the square, but my father was seriously ill, so I was spending alternate nights in the hospital with him and in the square looking after my students.”

It was Xu’s students who built the poly-styrene Statue of Liberty that became the symbol of the student uprising.

Xu recalls that none of his students got hurt “because they all ran away at the critical moment. One of them later got lost so I set off to visit all the hospitals looking for his body. I later discovered that he had run all the way back to his home town. Even with all that going on I was still completely numb about politics. I wasn’t interested. I didn’t really know what it was all about anyway. So when I got the chance to go to the US I took it.”

In 1990 Xu was invited to the University of Wisconsin Madison, where he began his new life teaching and experimenting with contemporary art. He believes China has changed a great deal since then. “China now has the best soil for contemporary art. It is a place where you have information and culture and everything. All the old concepts are changing. It is the biggest stage to perform on, and it gives me the best chance to perform.”

Xu Bing, Albion Gallery, London SW11 (www.albion-gallery.com 020-7801 2480), from Fri to June 23 2008

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