ART

A MAMMOTH MEDITATION ON ARTISTIC PLACE

Xu Bing's brilliant The Book from the Sky

By Wen Zhao

Mammoth

Xu Bing’s The Book from the Sky is one of the most monumental pieces of art of the 21st century. Rather interestingly much of its force comes from the way Bing’s piece embodies one of the most significant political and social tensions of the 21st century and that is the relationship between China and America. On the first point, you don’t need to trust me, almost every person who sees The Book from the Sky finds it overwhelming, but in my mind, it’s the second point that truly raises it to real brilliance.

His first official exhibition was in the National Art Museum of China in Beijing (1988). When you walk into the huge exhibition space, the walls are covered from top to bottom with Chinese rice paper. It's worth noting that all the words are written in Chinese characters. If you’re Chinese, seeing all those pictograms fills you with an immense amount of pride. However, as you enter the space and look carefully, you soon find out that not only can’t you read what’s written, but also all the characters are false and are written in some combination of Chinese and English. It’s more than a little surprising and disconcerting and makes you feel like a proud illiterate, which isn’t too great.

That's a lot of characters

So, what do you really see when you enter The Book from Sky? Well, a lot. The piece consists of more than 4000 "pseudo Chinese characters" that mimics the style of Ming dynasty calligraphy. The whole installation of this work is made up of hundreds of large books and ancient scrolls. 4,000 is a huge number and it feels as if Bing’s created another language.

Bing has said that these fake words "seem to make intellectuals uncomfortable,” forcing people to have doubts about what they think and know. In a video about the piece, an old man and master printer saw The Book from the Sky and got very angry because he could not recognize one word of it. He strongly questioned the value of the piece and thought that Bing’s creation was meaningless. Many people are compulsive and need to know what the words mean and find Bing’s work frustrating. Chinese characters are composed of pictographs and the image is all important. It’s what allows people to express what’s in their minds. Bing's work is made up of thousands of symbols that he created, but he hasn’t shared their meaning with anyone. They are merely or maybe just powerfully art. The more incomprehensible it is, the more people want to read it.

Read, if you can

For example, in figure A., it looks like a Chinese character, but it is actually the English word “excellent”. Notice the Ex in the upper left hand corner. In addition, the vertical text on the right is Bing’s signature, which is the “new English” style of “Xu Bing”. If you look carefully, reader, you can see the X and the U and then his last name spelled out in English.

Bing has created a book or really a language that begs you to read it, while not quite allowing you to do so. It has the appearance of a complete language, but you have the feeling that it might be saying nothing. Looking at it makes you feel like a person who has spent several years seriously engaged in meaningless activity. And that is why so many people find the piece frustrating, because it asks a basic question: what is the essence of a meaningful life? It’s hard to tell. This kind of doubt is expressed not only from viewers, but also from Bing himself. He has complained that his work takes so much time, so much effort, and a whole pile of words that no one can understand. And then later he came to believe that the more interesting things are, the more likely you are to doubt them when you do them.

Bing uses more than 4000 unreadable pure visual symbols to form a conceptual conflict between the formal aesthetic feeling of Chinese characters and the meaninglessness and incomprehensibility of the content. His paradox is reflected in the process of the audience’s reading of The Book from the Sky. Without a doubt, Bing’s characters break through the limitation of traditional calligraphy, deconstruct and reconstruct the characters to form a new artistic language.

Art larger than the average person

Some Chinese conservative art critics think that Bing's work does not respect history. They criticized it as the art of "Gui Da Qiang". "Gui Da Qiang" is a Chinese saying that describes people who "spin in circles" cannot find a way out. But I feel the opposite. What's important about The Book from Sky is how seriously Bing takes the Chinese language and the art of print marking. Part of the reason for the creation of pseudo Chinese characters is to separate the significance of characters so that people can see the aesthetic value of pictographs. This is a set of unreadable but very rigorous books.

As an artist, he tries to challenge the concept of state, history and identity. This forces every viewer, Chinese or not, to ask what historical books and practices are worth protecting. It also points out that the concepts of isolationism, ethnic migration and cultural heritage are all present and working at the same time. In fact, I would say that Bing has a respect for history and cultural practices that is at the very core of his art.

It's hard for us to find someone who knows Chinese characters as well as he does. At the same time, it's hard to find a person with his precision and technical ability willing to jump out of the tradition of their own culture and recombine it with another. The Book from Sky is very important for the repeatability of print and the seriousness of print. Part of the reason for the creation of pseudo Chinese characters is that it takes away the meaning of characters and makes people see the aesthetic value of the pictographs.

Unbelievable skill

This is the most interesting part of the work. Of course, you may say it's meaningless, but not everyone can make it. It's hard for us to find that all the characters printed on this magnificent scroll are not real Chinese characters if we don't get a close look at it. Although it is integral, each structure can be divided and reconfigured to form a new character, which conforms to the new form of Chinese characters. We need artwork like The Book from the Sky in our life, it shows the resilience and embodies the particularity of the Chinese written language.

In fact, people often need a sense of ceremony from life to death. People still need a ceremony to celebrate every stage of our lives. This is my thinking aroused by The Book from the Sky of heaven, and it is also the most meaningful attitude for me. Is everything that seems meaningless really meaningless?

©Wen Zhao and the CCA Arts Review