The Artist Project - Xu Bing: Character Rearrangement

Xu Bing was born in 1955 in China. As a
calligrapher and an artist, he challenged the
perception of knowledge via his mixed media
installation - Book from the Sky (1991). In this
installation, the space is covered with four-volume
treatises in which thousands of meaningless
characters were printed. Xu designed and
handcarved all these Chinese-like characters
although none of them are legible. The contrast
of filled pages and pointless contents push the
viewers to doubt their cognition. According to
Xu, this work seems to upset intellectuals as
many early viewers obsessively wanted to look
for real characters.

Opposite to the Book from the Sky, Xu’s ongoing
work Book from the Ground is meant to be understood
by any readers regardless of their age, race, cultural
background and educational background, as long as
they live in contemporary society. In this book, Xu
collects graphic signs from the public sphere and only
writes with these visual symbols. The commonality in
this book is shared in many cultures. As Xu indicates,
with the widespread use of internet and personal
electronic devices, the rapid growth and development
of the icon language has made the scale of this work
further updated, augmented, and complicated. 30 years
apart, from the Book from the Sky which no one can
understand, to the Book from the Ground which everyone
can understand; Xu’s works reveal a paradoxical yet
complementary idea - his desire for universal language.