Xu Bing

Xu Bing is a Chinese-born artist, currently residing in the United states. His work plays with the nature of Chinese script.

His work (below) Tienshu (A Book from the Sky) is an installation comprised of printed books and hanging scrolls, bound carefully in the traditions of Song and Ming Dynasty publications. The text, however, is made up of some 4,000 characters that though they look like Chinese characters in fact don't mean anything at all. Xu designed the characters, carved them into wooden blocks and used traditional typesetting techniques to produce the text.

The work - perhaps – explores the (perhaps oppressive) weight of culture and writing, the anxiety of meaning, the absurdity of modernity, and our relation to words and meaning-making.

Xu Bing, Tianshu, 1987-91.

Xu went on to produce the "square word" system, which turns English words into what look like Chinese characters – exploring questions of cultural identity and global hybridity.

Xu describes and shows the system here, also raising the differences between 'calligraphy' and 'writing' as signifying forms.

A further article from the New York Times  is available here.