Brilliant Ideas Episode #15: Xu Bing

Book from the Sky, a large installation art piece by Xu Bing that takes up the whole exhibition hall, is jammed with thousands of characters. When those who are curious about the content of the text approach the artwork, two entirely different situations happen. To the visitors from the countries outside the Chinese cultural sphere, the characters in the artwork have nothing peculiar. In their eyes, the characters look like any other Chinese characters. Chinese visitors, however, are extremely confused, since they cannot read a single character. Frustrating that they cannot read their own language, the viewers experience feelings of being illiterate. Some Chinese visitors actually lost their temper with the unreadable characters.
The characters in the Book from the Sky are a complete new kind of characters, created by depicting the Roman alphabets with the Chinese pictograms. The artist made 4,000 wood types to print the counterfeit characters, and hung the book he published all over the exhibition hall like a scroll, as if the characters were sent from the sky. The main function of a set of characters is to deliver the meaning represented by the characters. The characters created by Xu Bing, however, are not even readable. It is impossible from the start to grasp the meaning of them. By getting rid of the most important function from a set of characters, the artist brings out a problem in the communication through characters, pointing out how easily the meaning can be manipulated.

The Tiananmen Square uprising of 1989 was a turning point of for Xu Bing. Having participated in the protest by producing a large poster stating that the people is on the students’ side, the artist was under surveillance and he eventually chose to seek asylum in the U.S. As a New York-based artist since then, he has focused on his cultural identity and his cultural heritage.
Ghost Pounding the Walls, the first unveiled work of the artist since he defected to the U.S., is the Great Wall consisted of Chinese traditional rubbings. A huge installation art piece to match the size of the Great Wall, Ghost Pounding the Walls, is based on his contemplation on the identity of Chinese culture. The Great Wall is a heritage that represents physical efforts and time spent by the Chinese for the last 2,000 years, and is a source of pride for the Chinese as it is understood as a symbol of the country’s national power. Though producing rubbings of the Chinese masterpiece may seem to praise the greatness of the Great Wall, Xu Bing made the rubbings to prove the meaninglessness.

Xu Bing was born in 1955, in China. Currently living in Beijing, he is working as an installation artist and a calligrapher. He graduated from the Central Academy of Fine Arts and used to serve as the Vice President at the academy.
Xu Bing moved to the United States in 1990 due to the pressure and restrictions of the post-Tiananmen period in China. Since then, he began focusing on communications through text. He is most known for use of language, words, and text and how they have affected people’s understanding of the world. His artwork using the Alphabet which resembles Chinese characters, <New English Calligraphy>, brought him international recognition and another work where he collected dusts from Ground Zero after the 911, called <Where the dust itself collect?> got great attention from the public and art professionals. <Book from the Sky>, the books which consist of the fake words he created himself, is also well known for its enormous scale.
Recently, he has published a book titled 『Book from the Ground』 that is only produced with symbols and signs. Xu Bing is an artist working internationally covering both traditional and contemporary art.