Chinese Artist Xu Bing's Book Without Borders
中國藝術家徐冰無國界的畫冊
UBIQUITOUS ICONS: The notebook in
which Xu collected his symbols, as pictured in the companion publication 'The
Book about Xu Bing's Book From The Ground', edited by Mathieu Borysevicz MATHIEU BORYSEVICZ
There are no
words on the stark black-and-white cover of Xu Bing’s Book from the
Ground: from point to point, only two dots, two arrows and a picture icon
of a man like the one on the door of a restroom. Open it to the table of
contents and still there are no words, at least not in any recognizable language, just strands of small icons huddling in
line like beads on a necklace. And so it continues–there is not a single word in the entire book, but page after page of
what look like emojis. Taken together, the images tell the story of a
white-collar office worker over the course of 24 hours.
“I hope this
could be a book not limited by languages or history,” Xu Bing explains on a
winter day in his Brooklyn studio, speaking through a translator. Though he
returned to live in Beijing in 2008 after nearly two decades in the U.S., he
maintains this enclave in East Williamsburg behind an unassuming door covered
with stickers and graffiti.
Xu is here only
for the day, having just accepted a State Department Medal of Arts in
Washington for his participation in the Art in Embassies program and his
contribution to “cross-cultural dialogue and understanding through the visual
arts.” He is frequently traveling, flying all over the world to give talks,
install exhibitions and receive awards.
About a decade
ago, as he made his way through airport after airport, he began paying
attention to the myriad signs featuring images as well as
words, including the
airplane safety cards that use diagrams to explain emergency procedures to
multilingual audiences.
“This probably
is first international-reader book. Anyone can read it,” he says in accented
English as his translator-assistant steps away to answer the phone. Xu sits
bundled up in a gray coat and scarf against the chill that seeps in from
outside, his eyes framed by round, black-rimmed glasses, his black hair flecked
with white.
U.S. Secretary
of State John Kerry (R) greets honoree Xu Bing of China as he hosts a luncheon
celebrating recipients of the Art in Embassies Medal of Arts Award at the State
Department in Washington, January 21, 2015.JONATHAN ERNST/REUTERS
His interest in
pictorial storytelling was heightened by a bubblegum wrapper he happened upon–a
series of three images connected by two arrows that instructed the chewer to
put the gum back into the wrapper after chewing and throw it in the trash. This proved the inspiration for Book from the Ground.
“After that I
think I can use those icons to write a book that can be understood by
everyone,” he says. It reflects cultural literacy and that of modern tools and technologies
rather than traditional literacy. “You do not need to have any educational
background, you just need to see how well you adapt and get along in the contemporary world,” Xu
says, explaining that the younger generation is likely to find his icon
language easier to “read” because they’ve been exposed to these images for as
long as they can remember on the Internet.
The book has
been published in China, the U.S., Hong Kong and Taiwan so far, and comes out
soon in France and Mexico. Since there are no words, the editions are virtually
identical, some differing only by ISBN number.
“I think it can
be seen two ways,” says Robert Harrist, a professor of Chinese art history at
Columbia University who has taught a semester-length course on Xu’s work. “It’s
great that everybody can communicate now and stay in touch constantly through one medium or another, a kind of shared, plugged-in visual world.”
But at the same time, with the “flattening and evening out in communication so
much is lost,” especially when it comes to tense or nuance.
“The real
surprising thing here and the challenge and the thing I love about it is he
makes you ask yourself: What is writing?” adds Harrist, who describes Xu as
“the greatest living Chinese artist, simple as that.... Everything he does is
profoundly thoughtful.”
Book from the
Ground is not
Xu’s first project to contemplate language and writing. He is perhaps most
famous for Book from the Sky, which he created at the start of his
career in China and which catapulted him and Chinese contemporary art onto the
international stage.
Created between
1987 and 1991, Book from the Sky comprises scrolls upon
scrolls as well as volumes of text printed in what seem to be traditional
Chinese characters. But upon closer inspection, readers of Chinese will realize
the text is indecipherable.
“He invented
more than 4,000 characters which are illegible to
anyone, including to
the artist himself,” says Lidu (Joy) Yi, a professor at Florida International
University specialising in Chinese visual art and material culture. The
characters, which Xu carved by hand into wooden printing blocks, “look so
familiar and yet you don’t understand any of them.”
Unlike Book
from the Ground, which is accessible regardless of language or national
background, Book from the Sky is incomprehensible to everyone,
even though “every character he invents is close to being a real character,”
Harrist explains. “He takes you to the brink of legibility and then makes it
all fall apart.”
After sections
of the work were shown at the China Art Gallery in Beijing in 1988 and again as
a part of the China Avant-Garde Exhibition at Beijing’s National Art Gallery in
1989, Xu left China and moved to the United States. He worked as a fellow at
the University of Wisconsin-Madison, studied paper-making and Western
bookbinding in South Dakota and finally moved to the East Village in New York
City.
In the U.S., Xu
encountered his own struggle with language. “I didn’t command English very well,” he
says. In the years after moving to a foreign country, he says, “my works
express those feelings of conflict between two cultures and two languages.” So
another part of his work, Square Word Calligraphy, like Book
from the Sky, looks like traditional Chinese characters, but in fact each
“Chinese character” is a word in English, the letters arranged within a block
rather than laid out in linear fashion from left to right. “It’s like a
language with a mask,” Xu says.
“He’s a
contemporary artist and yet he always thinks through Chinese tradition,” says
Yi. “That’s the forever enchantment for me.”
Yi is curator of
an upcoming exhibition of Xu’s work at Florida International University.
Titled Xu Bing: Writing Between Heaven and Earth, it includes
versions of Book from the Sky, Square Word Calligraphy and Book
from the Ground.
Looking at these
three major projects throughout Xu’s career, “you see this continuing
meditation on language and communication,” says Harrist. And moreover, they’re
a “model for understanding everything else he has done.”
Xu’s huge
sculpture Phoenix, for example, appears at first to be two mythical
birds. Closer up, however, viewers can see they are built of junk, debris from
the construction site of the building where the birds were supposed to be
displayed. Xu chose these materials after visiting the site and seeing the
workers’ hard labour and the poor conditions they endured as they were
constructing a symbol of capitalism and wealth.
Phoenix has been shown at the Today Art Museum
in Beijing, the Shanghai World Expo 2010, the Massachusetts Museum of
Contemporary Art and the Cathedral of St John the Divine in New York City and
will make a surprise appearance in Europe later this year. Like Book
from the Sky, Square Word Calligraphy and Book
from the Ground, Phoenix is not what it seems at first
glance. “In every case there is the physical object you confront and it turns
out there is more,” says Harrist. “That is a pretty good paradigm for thinking
about what art is.”
Condensed from
Newsweek
04/09/15-
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