Grand Scale artwork: Book from the Sky

Figure 1. Book from the Sky, Installation view at Blanton Museum of Art, Austin, Texas, USA, 2016 

“Art is created from daily life and the problems that we face.”(Xu) This is the attitude of Xu Bing towards Contemporary Art. The artworks from Xu Bing are mostly based on the concept but also aim to confuse or blank already existing concepts. Like Marcel Duchamp's ''readymades''. His artwork makes the audience to rethink the relationship between culture and language. Xu Bing’s attitude of Contemporary Art is shown in the work - Book from the Sky. As Stanley K. Abw notes, “there was also considerable perplexity over whether to read the work as a critique or as an instantiation of Chinese Culture or as both.”(Wu 186) However, Book from the Sky (Tianshu) uses ‘empty’ content and visual language to express the artist 's ideologies and problems.

From 1987 to 1991, Xu Bing spent four years on Book from the Sky (Tianshu). “This installation is made with lots of books and forms a very huge book. When it’s opened, there are scrolls hanging from the ceiling and panels hanging on the wall. It looks like a serious, beautiful book, which was made in the Chinese tradition of thread binding.”(Guile 55) Visually, it attracts the audience to look at it because it is a grand scale artwork made with thousands of what look like Chinese characters. In reality, they are nonsense. Each designed by the artist in Song-style font (a font used in the Ming dynasty). (Xu) If the viewer tries to read the content of the scroll seriously, they would not get the meaning of the scrolls since the entirety is made of false characters. Book from the Sky looks like real Chinese, but no one can read it. At first glance, Chinese people may think the letters are ancient Chinese characters. And, to foreigners, it may appear to be real Chinese. Those nonsense characters give a sense of ambiguity. This artwork was made like a joke, it cost the artist four years to design and carve each letter on the wood. Finally, he produced around 4000 empty letters, inspired by everyday newspapers and books. “It means if your vocabulary is about 4000 words, then people can become an intellectual and be able to read.”(Guile 56) But if the 4000 letters are nonsense, can we read it fluently? Book from the Sky is a sophisticated art piece. As a sophisticated artwork, it must have important information and meaning in it. When people read it, it would cause a misunderstanding in the literal predicament. We all do not understand the meaning form Book from the Sky. Nevertheless, it treats everyone equally, no matter what language you speak or if you are educated or uneducated. In the same way, those nonsense characters from visual effect give the viewer a sense of ‘similarity’.(Guile 56)

Book from the Sky was made from Xu Bing’s perspective to describe the process of how Chinese characters were modified and simplified, which contains deep political messages in China during the Chinese Revolution. In China, deep linguistic culture is usually accompanied by an enormous devotion to written traditions. (Guile 47) Words act as an essence of the culture to record the history of the country. Why did Xu Bing attempt to breakthrough this literate culture? He answers the question saying, “was about Chairman Mao’s seizure of Chinese culture was ‘most deeply rooted’ in ‘his transformation of language.’”(Guile 47) From 1966 to 1976 during the Cultural Revolution, ‘repetition’ and ‘duplication’ had been the ‘chief technologies of cultural and artistic production’, the ‘two essential methods used to fill up time and space with a limited range of images and words, thereby creating a coercive, homogeneous verbal and visual language in a most static form.’(Guile 13) It had become the central focus of people’s memories and inspirations. During this time, the only reading is Mao’s ‘Little Red Book’. People could not choose what they want to read. The information from the ‘Little Red Book’ confused Xu Bing to understand the fundamental conceptions of culture. ‘Little Red Book’'s newly designed, radically simplified characters were intended to facilitate the spread of literacy among the Chinese masses. (Guile 47) It denied the earliest education from Xu Bing, it meant that he must give up everything that he already mastered and was forced to accept the new system. For example, use simple characters instead of traditional characters. Just like how Xu Bing was confused by the concept of culture, we have a similar feeling towards Book from the Sky. 

Book from the Sky can be regarded as a “new” language system, which bridges traditional art and contemporary art. The work is based on the dynamic dialogue between its seriousness and playfulness, which creatively invites the audience to participate in the meaning-generating process. (Tsao and Roger 8) Meanwhile, it is a warning from excessive dependence on the culture of writing, which makes it difficult for people to accept new information. For example, Chinese people have a definitive concept of the Chinese language and Chinese culture. However, when we are faced with Book from the Sky what we formed as the concepts for languages doesn’t work. You have to reset your mind and your preconceived knowledge to open up more space for new ideas, or to form a more reasonable relationship with memory. (Bloomberg) Compared with the Western conceptual art, Xu Bing and other Chinese conceptual artists naturally applied traditional language to their artistic creations with a dual aesthetic approach. By maintaining the integrity between the conceptual and pictorial embodiment in Chinese ideography, he propounds his concept and methodology. (Guile 31) The contemporary art of the East and the West are not viewed as two extremes or opposites, they always overlap with each other. Xu Bing’s works have been strongly influenced by Chinese traditional culture. Visually, Book from the Sky looks like a grand traditional Chinese Art, but the content belongs to Contemporary Art and reflects political issues of language modification in China. “In the West, Book from the Sky has engendered an even wider field of discussion, ranging in topics from the work’s cross-cultural significance in the context of Asian aesthetics to its cultural identity and the possibilities of its being accepted and interpreted in diverse cultural contexts.”(Guile 31)

In conclusion, Book from the Sky is an exploration of nonsense in words and letters, taking from the artist’s perspective to express the regret of language. And those ambiguous characters produce a strong visual impact on the audience, which makes the audience rethink or explore the truth of the characters. At the same time, Book from the Sky as a contemporary art maintain the traditional form of the Chinese ideography while reviewing the process of the Chinese Revolution and language modification.

Work Cited

XU BING - ARTWORK - Book from the Sky, www.xubing.com/en/work/details/206?year=1991&type=year#206.

Bloomberg. YouTube, YouTube, 20 Nov. 2015, www.youtube.com/watch?v=jxHWJjaUDQg.

Tsao, Hsingyuan, and Roger T. Ames. Xu Bing and Contemporary Chinese Art: Cultural and Philosophical Reflections. State University of New York Press, 2011.

Wu, Hung, et al. Xu Bing: Tobacco Project: Duke/Shanghai/Virginia, 1999-2011 ;Univ. of Virginia Press, 2011.

Xu, Bing, and Carolyn C. Guile. Reading Space: the Art of Xu Bing. Dept. of Art and Art History, Colgate University, 2009.