Xu Bing: A Logos for the Genuine Experience

By Valerie C. Doran

Xu Bing

In his groundbreaking text on the philosophy of language, Tractatus Logico-philosophicus, the analytical thinker Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889-1951) investigates the question of why a person can understand sentences that he has never previously encountered. Wittgenstein makes the seminal observation that a sentence which communicates something - what he terms `a proposition' - is in essence `a picture of reality' (D.F. Pears and B.F. McGuinness, trans., London, 1974, p. 21). Continuing within his philosophical framework, the idea that Chinese logographic characters present `pictures of reality', both semantically and literally, is a point of major conceptual interest, offering a tantalizing terrain for investigation. Embarking on such an investigation, however, the philosopher might well discover the tracks of an artist who has been carrying out his own explorations of this same conceptual terrain; but within his own framework and with his own subtly revolutionary aims.

On a hot midsummer's day in his studio in downtown Brooklyn, New York, the artist Xu Bing is working out the design logistics for a new installation entitled The Living Word. He is creating the installation as one of several site-specific projects for his upcoming - and, for a living Chinese artist, unprecedented - one-man show at the Smithsonian Institution's Arthur M. Sackler Gallery of Art in Washington, DC, opening in October this year (see note at the end of this article). As with many of his art projects since the mid-1980s, Xu's primary conceptual material is the Chinese written word.

Ancient texts record that the Chinese logographic system of writing was invented by a statesman named Cang Jie, a scribe or perhaps diviner at the court of the legendary Yellow Emperor. Cang Jie is said to have invented writing based on his observations of patterns occurring in nature, of `bird tracks, markings on turtles or dragons, or patterns in the land or the night sky' (Huainanzi, quoted and translated in Robert Ford Campany, Strange Writing: Anomaly Accounts in Early Medieval China, Albany, 1996, p. 122). These pictographs (xiangxing) were viewed as magically powerful in that they were believed to capture the very essence or spirit of the life-forms upon which they were based. Many modern Chinese characters are the result of the etymological evolution of these earliest pictographs over the three millennia that the Chinese written language has existed.

Ghosts Pounding the Wall By Xu Bing (b. 1955), 1990-91 Installation, ink rubbing, soil and stones Elvehjem Museum, University of Wisconsin

In developing The Living Word, Xu Bing references this natural, living root of the Chinese character to track an evolutionary duality that is at once etymological and metaphysical. For this project, Xu is creating a series of cutouts in thin plexiglass of the varying written forms of the character for bird (niao; M), from the earliest oracle-bone writing to elegant mediaeval calligraphic scripts to modern standardized forms. Using the floor, air, eaves and high windows of the Sackler gallery space, he will enact a multi-level process of transformation. Starting from the floor, he will lay a track of large-sized cut-outs of the modern forms of the character, bringing the track up into the air as it `de-evolves' into shimmering, suspended characters rendered in archaic and early calligraphic scripts, descending in time as they ascend into space, progressing upwards towards the high windows in a mass of smaller and smaller characters that de-evolve into the word's earliest manifestation as the simplified image of a natural form; until, finally, a flock of these images, both bird and word, fly out beyond reach through the open window.

As in many of his language-based installations, Xu is playing a deceptively simple conceptual game, using components so beautifully crafted and elegantly laid out that the viewer is lulled into anticipating a purely pleasurable aesthetic experience. The complexity and challenge of the works is revealed only after one has absorbed the visual semantics and progressed to recognizing what `picture of reality' they actually correspond to. In the case of The Living Word, one picture revealed is that of a shamanistic act: an attempt to call forth and release the spirits of the living beings captured through form and `engraved into books', as the first-century lexicographer Xu Shen described it (Shuowen jiezi, 2.2.1, in Campany, op. cit.) But Xu is not a shaman, and these `birds' taking flight are never fully released from their captive state. The transformation fails. They remain engraved in human culture.

Xu Bing's language-based works are intended as subversive acts: `To tamper with the written word is to strike at the very foundation of a culture,' he has often said. The artist's intense belief in the power of the word is in part informed by Chinese traditional culture, in which the logograph, with its mystical beginnings and its rarefied literary and artistic manifestations in the hands of the scholar-artists, was regarded as sacred. It is also informed by Xu's experience of growing up in Beijing during the Cultural Revolution as the educated son of intellectuals (both his parents were academics at Beijing University, his mother a librarian and his father a professor). `The influence of words on my generation was especially powerful,' Xu has said. `Words alone could determine a person's fate. They could kill one person, and ensure a very good life for someone else. There was a saying then: "Pick up a pen, just as you would a knife or a gun." The idea was to show how powerful the pen can be. My memory of life at that time is crowded with those written Chinese characters, from the sky to the ground, everywhere on the street, just everywhere, these big character posters and slogans' (interview with Xu Bing in `Twixt East and West', on the `Virtual China' website: virtualchina.org/archive/leisure/art/xubing2.html). Academics were favourite targets of political attack in this period, and the word as political weapon had a very personal sting for Xu as he saw his own father fall victim: `Anyone accused of being part of the Black Gang [counter-revolutionary or bourgeois], including my own father, had to wear these dunce caps with insults on them and plaques on their chests with slogans on them. The effect is that you end up feeling that words are very powerful things' (ibid.).

Born in 1955 in Chongqing, Sichuan province, Xu Bing spent his formative years in Beijing. Artistically gifted as a child, he excelled in calligraphy, the forms of which he learned under the guidance of his father. Sharing the fate of many urban students of the period, in 1975 Xu was temporarily yanked away from school and family and `sent down' to the countryside for two years of Maoist re-education, to labour alongside the workers and peasants of the rural areas and aid them in whatever manner his talents might suit. Among his other duties, Xu was employed in the monotonous production of printed propaganda materials, but on occasion he was also enlisted by the local people to write calligraphic couplets and auspicious sayings for weddings and other important occasions. Again, he was surrounded by the myriad and contradictory powers and manipulations of the written word. This period of `grass roots' education, which continued in shorter stays in the countryside throughout Xu's university years, had a profound effect on the artist. Throughout the process of his development into one of today's most intriguing and subtly complex artists, elements reflecting the strange and moving dynamics of these experiences - the mechanics of daily toil, the polarities of literacy and illiteracy, the propaganda of culture in the midst of nature, and above all the dialectics of estrangement and re-familiarization - re-emerge from his consciousness into his art and alter his direction.

Returning to Beijing in 1977, Xu was admitted to the Central Academy of Fine Arts, where he concentrated on printmaking and calligraphy. He entered enthusiastically into the climate of intellectual and artistic experimentation that characterized post-Cultural Revolution urban China in the early to mid-1980s, carrying out his own experiments with the meticulous curiosity of the scientist and the subversive abandon of the iconoclast. He experimented with the idea of using the printing process to transfer the image of unconventional objects, for example the wheels of a truck, or the stone surface of the Great Wall of China, a concept which he later developed into one of his most monumental and moving works, Ghosts Pounding the Wall (1991). His graduation project for his Master's degree in Fine Arts from the Central Academy, Five Series of Repetitions (1987), shows his interest in using unconventional methods to reveal the underlying structures both of an image and a process. Using the same large wooden block, the artist recorded the printmaking process by printing each successive stage of the block's carving, all the way through to the completion of the final image, revealed at the end as an abstracted view of a rural landscape of cultivated fields and fish-ponds. The final impact of the exhibited work, with its meticulous and expansive mounting in rows along walls and in precisely constructed cases on the floor, is impressive in its texture and detail yet oppressive in its rhythmic monotony. Looking for symbolism, one could say that it has the same existential momentum as cultivating a field.

After graduation, Xu Bing was engaged by his alma mater as an assistant professor of art, and appeared to go into a period of withdrawal from active participation in Beijing's contemporary art scene. In late 1988, he suddenly resurfaced with an exhibition of what has become his most famous act of cultural and aesthetic subversion: the installation Book from the Sky (Tianshu), a solemnly beautiful expression of existential absurdity. Xu first showed the work in a solo exhibition at the prestigious National Gallery of Art, and then again at the controversial `China/Avant-garde' exhibition at the same venue a few months later, in February 1989. Its impact on China's fiercely percolating New Wave art scene was immediate and sensational. Xu Bing had wedded a near-sacrosanct cultural vocabulary to postmodern conceptualism, forging a picture of reality that, in the climate of imminent and unpredictable change that characterized Beijing in the late 1980s, both resonated with and alarmed its viewers.

In the installation, the viewer enters a room in which beautiful books, hand-bound in the traditional manner, are aligned in gleaming wooden boxes along the floor, while printed scrolls of the finest paper billow down from the ceiling and line the walls. The pages and scrolls are covered with thousands of precisely elegant Chinese characters, printed from hand-carved wooden blocks. The installation creates a meditative atmosphere redolent with `the fragrance of books' - books of knowledge, sacred books, books of poetry, books of rites - promising the pleasures, challenges, meditations and comforts of the printed word. But as the artists, professors, critics, scholars and bureaucrats who first encountered Book from the Sky in Beijing came to discover, none of these thousands of tantalizing characters are intelligible: all are `false words', invented by the artist and mocking the unrequited reader. The lure of the written word becomes an entrapment, as false as any siren's.

`When all these educated people first saw Book from the Sky in China they were shocked,' says Xu Bing. `Here they were in an environment of high scholarly culture, in their own element, and they couldn't read the words. They had suddenly become illiterate.' Many artists and critics immediately recognized Book from the Sky as a seminal work. One year later, the critic Chen Weihe characterized it as `the outward sign of the real emergence of Chinese modernism' and `the turning point of New Wave art' (Chen Weihe, `Lun Xu Bing ji qi Tianshu', in Zhishi fenzi, no. 1, 1990, p. 81, quoted in Britta Erickson, `Process and Meaning in the Art of Xu Bing', in Three Installations by Xu Bing, Madison, 1991, p. 11).

As the critic Gao Minglu has recently pointed out, within the discourse of contemporary Chinese art, Book from the Sky has become almost the stuff of legend (Gao, `Tiancai chuyu qinfen, guannian laizi shougong: Xu Bing de yishu he fangfa lun', forthcoming exhibition catalogue, Eslite Art Gallery, Taipei). Its very title reflects this status: originally Xu had named the work A Mirror to Analyse the World: The Last Book of the End of the Century (Xi shi jian - shiji mo zhuan) but artists and critics came to refer to it more succinctly as Tianshu, which can be translated either as `book from the sky' or, more literally, `heavenly book'. Traditionally, the term designates a mystical text bestowed directly from heaven, or, in a more mundane context, a book that is incomprehensible to the average person. As is the case with many legendary events, there are varying accounts concerning the details of just how Xu produced this complex work. A definitive description, by the critic and curator Britta Erickson, appeared in the catalogue of the first exhibition of Book from the Sky in the West, which took place in 1991 at the Elvehjem Museum of Art at the University of Wisconsin in Madison:

Xu spent three years designing and carving the characters and having the books and scrolls printed and bound or mounted. The year he spent carving was a year of isolated contemplation which Xu found relaxing. In his determination to produce characters as like real characters as possible, Xu systematically took one genuine radical (a component of a character) at a time and combined it with other genuine character components to produce thousands of new characters. He eliminated all but those that seemed the closest to real characters and then carved them in reverse on blocks of pearwood, to be typeset and printed in the traditional manner. He claims to have carved about 4,000, approximately the same number as there are frequently used genuine characters. The bound books are laid out in the traditional format, with an index at the front referring to the numbered pages of the main text...and commentary inscribed in the margins. There is even a glossary giving definitions of the invented characters using other invented characters. A private printing house in Beijing printed and bound the books, and a village in Hebei built wooden boxes to house the sets of four volumes, as traditionally was done with important sets of books in China. (Erickson, op. cit., p. 12).

`In Book from the Sky, I was using traditional culture to subvert culture,' says Xu. `The sincere and formal grandeur of the work comes out of China's high and weighty cultural tradition, but then at the centre you find a joke. It's this duality that gives it its power.' The high level of education, technical training, effort, expense and patient fortitude required to produce Book from the Sky made its utterly intentional unintelligibility all the more shocking. In a society where literacy was still a privilege, and at a time when the government was becoming dangerously uncomfortable with the atmosphere of freewheeling political and social criticism, Book from the Sky was seen by the authorities as a particularly scathing and anarchical attack on both socialist and cultural values. Xu Bing had somehow broken an implicit taboo. A portentous critique of the work appeared in an official state newspaper just days before the Tiananmen Incident erupted:

I have always felt that when people do something they must have a clear goal, for themselves, for others, for the people, for all mankind - to have no purpose at all is absurd and dissolute. If I am asked to evaluate A Book from the Sky, I can only say that it gathers together the formalistic, abstract, subjective, irrational, anti-art, anti-traditional...qualities of the New Wave of fine arts, and ushers the Chinese New Wave towards a ridiculous impasse. I am reminded of a Chinese idiom, `ghosts pounding the wall'. In the past a traveler was walking in the midst of a dark night. When he lost his sense of direction and lost all reference points upon which he could rely to judge where he was, he spent the rest of the night walking in circles in the same spot. It was as if a ghost had built an invisible wall, making it impossible for [the traveler] to leave its confines. Can't we say that A Book from the Sky...is the phenomenon of `ghosts pounding the wall' in human thinking, activity and artistic creativity?...This brings to me a deep understanding that the essence of the Chinese New Wave of fine arts is to oppose the laws of art and to oppose society (Yang Chengyin, `"Xin chao" meishu lun gang', in Wenyi bao, 2 June 1989, p. 5; quoted in Erickson, p. 15).

Xu Bing's reaction to the increasing official attacks on his work was typical of his own brand of cerebral rebelliousness: to turn the language of authority on its head, and in so doing to reveal another meaning, another reality within and beyond it. His first move was to appropriate the censorious term `ghosts pounding the wall' and make it the title of his next major project. In early 1990, amid the gloom of Beijing after Tiananmen, Xu decamped with a group of Central Academy students to the village of Jinshanling in the shadow of the Great Wall. There, he, the students and a group of local workers spent one month dangling in the air from bamboo scaffolding engaged in the painstaking daily labour of taking thousands of ink rubbings from a 16th century segment of the wall, applying techniques traditionally used for stelae and tomb rubbings. Although the undertaking stimulated interest and curiosity in art circles and the press, Xu Bing never completed Ghosts Pounding the Wall in China. In the increasingly suffocating post-Tiananmen climate, he left that year for the United States, accepting an invitation from the University of Wisconsin for a resident fellowship in art. In Wisconsin, Xu returned to the conceptual process of Ghosts Pounding the Wall and installed it as part of his first US exhibition at the university in 1991, simply entitled `Three Installations by Xu Bing'.

The other-worldly monumentality of Ghosts Pounding the Wall creates the impression of walking into an ancient, empty tomb. Strangely eloquent rubbings of the textured surfaces of the stones line the walls of the exhibition space and a long sheet composed of rubbings of a segment of the walkway spills down from the ceiling, terminating in a mound of earth that anchors the walkway to the floor. Xu Bing has said of Book from the Sky that it is like a `great empty space' which people can fill with their own reactions and interpretations. In a sense, Ghosts Pounding the Wall has the same effect: its subject and imagery are also culturally and politically charged, but it has the added dimension of a strong emotional connotation, given the hundreds of thousands who died in the centuries-long process of the Great Wall's creation and who are very present in the collective memory of Chinese society. Xu Bing himself has generally given a neutral interpretation to this work, focusing more on its artistic and conceptual language: his official portfolio version states his intention `to showcase, in an indoor setting, a unique visual experience of objects commonly seen in the open air', and `to engage fundamental issues of printmaking.' Yet, for the viewer, the work can have the effect not only of carrying one back into history, but forward into language: this ghost of a wall acts as a visual metalanguage, re-examining both the structure of the physical wall and its existence in cultural and political consciousness.

Both Book from the Sky and Ghosts Pounding the Wall represent the strategy of Xu's artistic response to deeply felt experiences: to create a new language to communicate something that otherwise the artist finds very nearly unsayable. In the same vein, the third work in Xu's Wisconsin exhibition, entitled A,B,C..., constitutes a kind of linguistic scrambling, expressing the artist's initial response to his unaccustomed existence as a cultural outsider.

A lighter, more humorous statement than his monumental pieces, it too has an effect of relentless exposure - this time of Xu's own sense of awkwardness and displacement. Using a series of ceramic blocks reminiscent of children's alphabet blocks, Xu inscribed their surfaces with his own conceived `transliterations' into Chinese of the letters of the Roman alphabet. The characters are carved on the upper face of each ceramic block in the form of a printer's stamp, and the Roman letter is printed on the side. For example, the English letter A is rendered by the Chinese ai, which means `sadness'. B is bi, which means `land on the other side, on the other shore'. Some letters, such as W, had to be represented by more than one character. The overall effect is of a self-conscious straining to communicate across languages.

`Three Installations by Xu Bing' had a major impact on its American audience, and Book from the Sky in particular has become a focus of lasting interest both in the United States and abroad. What is so fascinating about this circumstance is that of all Xu Bing's works, Book from the Sky most deeply references Chinese cultural and societal issues - a condition that would seem to pre-empt to a great degree the genuine and visceral manner in which Western audiences have responded to it. `People have often asked me the question "Isn't this work primarily effective for Chinese who know an authentic Chinese character when they see one?"' says Xu. `But this didn't worry me at all when I brought my work overseas to exhibit. I knew that it wouldn't have the same kind of effectiveness as it would in places where Chinese was the lingua franca - but what I found instead was that the response to Book from the Sky in the West was overwhelmingly strong and positive. It seems that even if a Western viewer doesn't immediately apprehend the "trick" that I'm playing with words in the same way that a Chinese viewer would, he or she is getting something else from it, focusing on a different aspect of it. And it is probable that the Chinese observer who is immediately affected by the words is not being affected by those other things in the same way as the Western viewer is.' The resonance of Book from the Sky has extended even across artistic media: an American composer, Hugh Livingston, responded to the work by writing and recently performing a music score for cello based on the changing, printed configurations of Xu's invented text.

As Xu continued to live and work in the United States, the small daily traumas of existence in the awkward third space between two cultures became the new references for his language-based works. The subversive, dark humour lacing the issues of estrangement, alienation and miscommunication in Xu's earlier works became increasingly prominent in his art projects of the mid-1990s. Presaging a current trend in Chinese experimental art on the mainland, Xu began to create performance-based artworks incorporating live animals, placing them in different kinds of enforced contact with human language and then stepping back to allow the dichotomy between species, between nature and language - and by extension, nature and culture - to develop freely into whatever form of pathos or absurdity might emerge. In 1994, Xu made what seems to have been a pointed decision to return to Beijing to stage his most controversial - and influential - project of this type, Case Study of Transference. For the work, Xu visited a pig farm to choose two breeding animals ready to mate. The bewildered pigs were stamped with printed, nonsensical texts: the male with `English' words and the female with `Chinese' characters. The animals were then taken to a performance space littered with books where they proceeded to copulate vigorously under the gaze of a crowd of onlookers. The contrast between the crude earthiness of this performance piece and the cold elegance of his last major work seen in Beijing, Book from the Sky, was another shock for Xu's audience, who were completely unprepared for this picture of reality emerging from Xu's new existential conditions.

Like language itself, Xu's projects incorporating live animals hover on the border between the ridiculous and the lyrical. In The Parrot (1994-95), a live parrot chosen and carefully trained by the artist is placed in a cage in the exhibition space where it utters phrases such as `Humans beings are so boring!', `Modern art is crap! and `Why are you holding me prisoner? You bastards!' In the Silkworm (1994-95), silkworm eggs are ordered, hatched and fed mulberry leaves until ready to spin silk. They are then placed amid an installation of books, photographs and a laptop computer, quietly spinning so that over a period of several days the objects become obscured and finally covered in silken thread. (Xu makes the proviso that `this installation/performance is limited to silkworm season and therefore can only be performed between the months of April and October. The project must be perfectly timed, and when the creatures are ready, the performance is staged.') In other performance pieces, a sheep is tethered by a leash composed of linked metal words forming a poem (The Leash, 1997), or contained behind a fence of woven metal phrases (The Net, 1998). In all of these works, the animal bears witness to the incomprehensibility of the language and the artist's purpose, and at the same time is a free agent introducing, in its ultimately unpredictable reactions, the randomness of nature into the established codes of Xu Bing's project matrixes. (It should be noted here that, although Xu's projects such as Case Study of Transference can be identified as having helped to inspire the present trend in experimental Chinese art circles of using live animals in performance pieces, he strongly distances himself from the increasingly extreme works in which live animals are tortured and mutilated. `Although I think any medium can be used in an artwork if it is absolutely necessary to the artist's ability to say what he needs to say, I can never condone brutality towards a living creature,' Xu has stated. `Some rumours have it that in Case Study of Transference, I injected the animals with hormones to force their behaviour. This is untrue. Visiting farms to find the animals in just the right natural state was a key aspect of the project. The ultimate unpredictability of their own will and behaviour in the performance space was also a fundamental element of the concept'.

In the eleven years since Xu Bing moved to the United States from Beijing, he has achieved recognition as a major figure on the international contemporary arts scene, one whose works have broadened the conceptual landscape of contemporary art. From his base in Brooklyn, where he lives with his partner, the painter Cai Jin, and their baby daughter Xu Siyi, Xu Bing is constantly sought out by galleries, museums and universities from the East and West for major solo and group exhibitions; has been the subject of innumerable articles and scholarly papers; and has won important art commissions all over the world. In 1999, Xu's artistic endeavours were given major recognition when he received the prestigious MacArthur Award, popularly known in the United States as `the genius grant', given by the John and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation to a select group of artists, scientists and scholars who have demonstrated great originality and commitment in their field. The award came as a complete surprise to Xu Bing, since nominations are kept secret. On the day he was notified, Xu says he was unable to take the call as he was `running around PS1' [an institute for contemporary art in New York] preparing to install an exhibition. When he received the message that someone was calling him with `good news' he assumed that it was from his assistant to say that a problem with a leash had been resolved.

From November 1999 to May 2000, the Museum of Modern Art in New York displayed a monumental, electric-red banner outside its front entrance, created by Xu Bing. Thirty-six feet long, the banner was inscribed with what appeared to be a slogan in Chinese characters executed in rough, powerful brushstrokes of brilliant yellow. As with the printed texts in Book from the Sky, the viewer literate in Chinese would find his efforts to read the characters on the banner to be fruitless, and might conclude that these, too, were false, invented characters flaunting their meaninglessness. Conversely, one unable to read Chinese would assume they were genuine, and not attempt to decipher them. This time, however, both assumptions would be wrong. With just the slightest shift in perception, the `characters' are revealed to be less pure invention than re-invention: English words deconstructed but then reconfigured into characters that mimic the `square' structure of Chinese characters, easily comprehensible once the initial trick is understood. Having grasped this, one then finds the banner reads: `ART FOR THE PEOPLE/Chairman Mao said/by Xu Bing'. The `characters' are in fact examples of what Xu Bing calls `new English calligraphy', part of an increasingly complex ongoing project centred on a new system of writing Xu has created and which he has dubbed `square-word calligraphy'.

The system, which can be adapted to any language using the Roman alphabet (Xu has also created, for example, `new Spanish calligraphy' and `new Czech calligraphy', among others), has been the basis for a series of interactive `calligraphy classroom' installations he has been developing in the last few years and mounting all over the world. Often Xu will appear at the exhibition site for a few days to teach in the `classroom', after which an instructional video is shown on computer monitors (sometimes built into the old-fashioned desks). These classrooms are elaborate constructions, with an attendant set of `traditional' materials that include actual printed calligraphy copybooks (zitie) created by Xu, hanging scrolls bearing poems or couplets in square-word calligraphy, even carved stelae and rubbings taken from them. The script is actually now being developed into a computer font by a Japanese software company. For his upcoming Sackler exhibition, the museum has arranged with a local cable television company to broadcast a series of lessons in `new English calligraphy' taught by Xu.

In the contemporary art circles of mainland China, the high regard in which Xu Bing is held in the West, and the attendant success he has enjoyed as a Chinese artist working on a global level, present an interesting problem for certain critics and artists engaged in the postmodern, post-colonial discourse. In a recent issue of the Beijing-based Internet art magazine, Chinese-art.com, critic and artist Wang Nanming denounced Xu Bing, and his `new English calligraphy' in particular, as `making increasingly evident his neo-colonialist status as an overseas Chinese artist':

Employing radicals and components of Chinese characters to change the way English letters are written only perpetuates and feeds the fantasies of neo-Confucianists and logo-centric Chinese cultural theorists that they might somehow change or reform the West through Chinese culture...[The] so-called `Chinese' traditional calligraphy and its practices are the subject of deconstruction and criticism in contemporary China...From the standpoint of cultural studies, the reality that underlies works comprising `New English Calligraphy' or even `Calligraphy' is that such works are inevitably the product of overseas Chinese who, completely removed from the linguistic framework of contemporary China, resort to working with concepts and materials defined as `Chinese' by Western hegemonism. From an indigenous point of view, these works are only a perpetuation of past cultural modalities. They are hardly representative images deriving from an evolved concept of China itself'. (`Why We Should Criticize Xu Bing's "New English Calligraphy" and Acknowledge Liu Chao's "Machine Calligraphy", in Chinese-art.com, vol. 4.2, 2001, pp. 1-5)

When asked if he had read the article, Xu Bing's response was typically low-key: `Yes, I saw Wang Nanming's criticism of me. I think this is kind of simplistic thinking'. It is true that after the initial surprise at the actual comprehensibility of `new English calligraphy' wears off, one is tempted to think that perhaps Xu's new system is little more than a clever entertainment. But the seeming simplicity of his concepts is always deceptive.

Robert Campany has pointed out that the attempts of early Chinese diviners and thinkers to `encapsulate in miniature the articulate structure (the wen or pattern) of knowledge and of reality depended on the organization of written signs into a spatial matrix' (Campany, op. cit., p. 126). Up to a point, this is also true of Xu Bing. His system of square-word calligraphy can be described as a postmodern, global-village version of such an attempt. While in many of his previous works Xu deconstructed language to expose a falsity or meaninglessness at its core, in square-word calligraphy he is engaging in an almost phenomenological exploration of the literal structures of language as a cognitive force. His aim is no less than to appropriate these structures and apply them in new ways that can challenge received cultural perceptions, and more importantly, break down old patterns of thought, regrouping them to expand what he calls the `cognitive space' (siwei kongjian).

For Xu Bing, the `Art for the People' banner, with its metres-high characters in `new English calligraphy', has served as an apt public testament to a new stage in his development as an artist; one that has brought him, in a sense, full circle to readdress some of the issues that interested, moved and perplexed him when he was a very young artist undergoing Cultural Revolution-style re-education amid the poverty and the people of the countryside. A major catalyst in this change was a month-long trek Xu made through the Nepalese Himalayas in the autumn of 1999 as part of a project conceived by the Kiasma Museum of Contemporary Art in Helsinki. The museum had invited a group of six international artists to travel together in Nepal and to stage in Helsinki an exhibition of works created in response to the experience. Xu looked forward to the trip as a way of reliving some version of his experiences in China, but was unprepared for the way his presence in Nepal proved instead to be a litmus test of how much he himself had changed:

I went to Kathmandu with the same sort of mental and emotional preparation as when I had gone to the Chinese countryside before, yet as I took a pedicab from the airport to the hotel I began to feel that things were not quite as I expected. Perhaps it was because I was not labouring among the local people. There was just a faint recollection of something that I had understood a long time before...I did not know then how I should use my own eyes to look. I began to feel the strangeness of my own eyes. These were the eyes of Western tourists that I had myself seen before in China - but from the other side. These eyes were superior to and casually curious about what they looked-upon. I still wasn't used to this pair of eyes. I wasn't used to the feeling of understanding the way it felt to be the onlooker rather than the looked upon. There was a profound shift in my identity and viewpoint, and I was overcome with a feeling of uncertainty and rootlessness. This was the most profound experience I had in Nepal; and also something I had never encountered in all my countless trips to the countryside in China. Of course, the feeling was inextricably linked to the intervening experience of my ten years living in the West. But it was not until I went through the test of spending a special period of time in Nepal that this was brought out. (Xu Bing, `Gaining Grass Roots Experience', in A Delicate Balance: Six Routes to the Himalayas, Helsinki, 2000, p. 36)

Feeling an estrangement from the people upon whose land he was intruding, Xu began to focus on the countryside itself. Leaving his camera and his conceptualism behind, he spent long hours alone with a small notebook, sketching in the open air. Sitting amid mountains, he found himself engaged in a kind of quirky literati ink-play, literally `writing the landscape' by using Chinese calligraphic characters to construct illustrations of landscape forms: for example, the character for mountain duplicated over and over to create the image of a mountainscape. He filled his notebooks with these word-sketches of trees, huts, fields, etc., creating what he describes as his own fusion of poetry, painting and calligraphy. The resulting images are primitive in the best sense of the word. They are simple, rustic and cleanly done, but impart the feeling of a genuine inspiration from a genuine experience. (Someone will probably have a heart attack if I say they remind me of Shitao.) Xu used some of these sketches from his Himalayan journal as the basis for his Helsinki project, which he called Helsinki/Himalaya Exchange.

Although conceptual in approach, Xu's project was primarily inspired by his renewed sense of the importance of connecting art to life, and most particularly to the life of `the people': despite Mao's many hideous missteps, this aspect of his socialist cultural admonitions has now regained a fundamental significance for Xu. For the Helsinki exhibition, he created an installation in which a donation box from a Nepalese village rested on a simple structure of wood and stones. Alongside this structure were packets of small postcards, images from Xu's Himalayan Journal beautifully printed on handmade Nepalese paper. A sign invited visitors to place money in the box, which would be donated to a fund to help educate Nepalese children, and then to take a packet of postcards as an acknowledgement of their generosity. At the end of the exhibition period the box was opened; and the money inside, over US$5,000, was sent to Nepal and used to construct a schoolhouse in an impoverished mountain village.

In the past two years Xu Bing has continued to translate the inspirations of his experiences in Nepal into a group of subtle but radical works. One of his most recent, Reading Landscape (2000-2001), commissioned by the North Carolina Museum of Art in Raleigh, is a conceptual extension of the word-landscapes of his Himalayan journal. Meditating on the view of the landscape outside the windows of the gallery space, Xu Bing then `spelled out' the natural scenery in a three-dimensional landscape covering floor, ceilings and windows, and composed of over 1,000 plexiglass characters rendered in early logographic script. For the same exhibition, Xu applied this same technique to a landscape painting in the museum's collection, extending the image by continuing it onto the walls using Chinese characters to represent its various elements.

Although, in a sense, Xu's audience has always been a part of his subject matter, his desire to create a closer connection between his art and his audience, reflected in works such as Art for the People, Introduction to New English Calligraphy and Helsinki/Himalayan Exchange, is at the heart of an ambitious and groundbreaking project recently commissioned by Duke University in Durham, North Carolina. Invited to lecture at Duke in 1995 by the art historian and professor Stanley Abe, Xu was struck by the constant scent of tobacco in the air, emanating from Durham's many tobacco-curing plants. When Abe later approached him with the suggestion that he create a piece of `public art' for Duke, Xu Bing immediately thought of the `tobacco culture' of the city and its economy built around the cultivation and sale of tobacco products. Xu had also learned that the university itself was founded by tobacco baron James B. Duke (1865-1925), who in the late 19th century masterminded the exportation of the cigarette-rolling machine to China. By 1928, Duke-affiliated businesses in China were selling as many 80 billion cigarettes a year. The rest is history: even Chairman Mao always carried a cigarette in his hand.

Calling his work Tobacco Project, Xu created a series of multimedia installations incorporating the materials, processes and consequences of tobacco manufacture. The many facets of the installations are too complex to describe in full detail, but among other things Xu created boxes filled with Dada-esque cigarettes printed with rows of text and with filters on either side, `books' of tiny bound sheets of text printed on rolling papers, books of tobacco leaves which were consumed by beetles during the course of the exhibition, and a floor with silk-screen transfer prints of tobacco-related texts from old newspapers and books. For a linked exhibition in an abandoned tobacco manufacturing plant in Durham proper, Xu created an installation to be seen only at night, the solemnity and monumental, chilling quality of which echoed Ghosts Pounding the Wall and Book from the Sky. This time, however, Xu allowed the possibility of communication by joining, through intimate gesture, the language of his own personal history with the history of his local audience.

Into the floor of a main room of the abandoned tobacco factory, he installed the single word `longing', formed of ice-blue neon light tubes. Sheets of dry ice were placed over the form, creating an effect that Xu describes as `clean, cold and pure'. On the outer wall of the building, slides were projected showing pages written in Chinese from the medical records of a hospital patient who died of lung cancer. A voice from inside the building could be heard reading these same records out loud in an English translation: how the patient felt that day, what medications were administered, the patient's reaction, the increasing weakness of the lungs, the final notation that the patient died of asphyxiation. The medical records are those of Xu Bing's own father, a heavy smoker for over twenty years. In preparing for this project, Xu had travelled back to Beijing to retrieve the records from the hospital where his father died.

The Tobacco Project is regarded by many who have seen it as a seminal work. The art historian and critic Wu Hung, professor of art at the University of Chicago, is said to be planning to write a book around it. But in simply thinking it through, what seems most radical in Xu Bing's recent works is the presence of a positive act: without fear for his own identity, Xu does his audiences the honour of taking them into his subject, allowing the languages they speak, the patterns that they see, the reality of which they are also a part to enter into the cognitive structure of his own artistic language. He is, he says, no longer so much interested in jiegou (deconstruction), as in gaizao (restructuring).