Book From the Sky to Book From the Ground (從天書到地書) is many things: It’s a book launch and a contest that anyone from anywhere in the world can enter. It presents a narrative thread that shows how technology can be used to manipulate our ideas about language. More than anything else, though, the retrospective of works by Xu Bing (徐冰), a renowned Chinese avant-garde and conceptual artist, impressively contextualizes the evolution of his ideas about language and culture.
The exhibition, currently on display at Eslite Gallery (誠品畫廊), brings together two earlier installations, Book From the Sky (天書) and Square Word Calligraphy (新英文書法), as well as his recent Book From the Ground (地書), a novel and interactive computer installation.
Born in 1955 into a family of intellectuals — his mother was a library administrator and his father chaired the history department at Beijing University — Xu’s early ideas about the uses (and abuses) of language and its relation to experience were informed by the volatile period leading up to and during the Cultural Revolution. It was a time when his parents were persecuted and Xu, who demonstrated an early facility with writing, was forced to use his literary talents to make propaganda posters similar to those that had condemned his father.
Photo: Noah Buchan, Taipei Times
“At that time you really felt the power of words,” he told Claire Liu in a profile of the artist for Print, a US magazine about contemporary visual culture. “If you wanted to kill somebody, you did it not by gun but by brush.”
Yet the genesis of Book From the Sky is not only to be found in this destructive cultural milieu. As art critic Alice Yang wrote in Xu Bing: Rewriting Culture, he also looks to the past to address “the tangled legacy of his cultural heritage,” while reflecting on the critical introspection and cultural fever that infected Chinese literary and artistic society in the decade following the Cultural Revolution.
The installation is patterned after Song Dynasty calligraphy. Xu spent four years hand-carving some 4,000 faux-Chinese characters (the number of characters in frequent use) from wooden blocks, which he then typeset and printed onto large sheets of paper that were mounted into books or onto scrolls. We are presented with pictograms that are familiar, yet strange, apparently Chinese, yet rendered in a meaningless language that is meant to break the “cognitive structures of the mind,” as Xu calls the habitual ways of thinking that have resulted in so much bloodshed in his homeland.
Those who read Chinese uniformly perceive a meaningless text, while those unable to read Chinese see it as a cultural document not dissimilar from what we might find exhibited at the National Palace Museum. Readers and non-readers of Chinese equally share in the experience of being able to perceive a language — though one whose meaning they are estranged from. In so doing, Book From the Sky compels the viewer to reconsider cherished assumptions about language and unquestioned traditions.
Similar to Book From the Sky, Square Word Calligraphy takes the form of traditional texts and mounted scrolls. It was created after Xu moved to the US in 1991, and presents English with Chinese pictorial elements.
For Xu, Book From the Sky and Square Word Calligraphy are the same because they “have different effects on people from different cultures, but the entry point is essentially the same. In both, the invented characters have a sort of equalizing effect: they are playing a joke on everybody, but at the same time they do not condescend to anybody,” he said in an interview with Sculpture magazine.
In the same interview, Xu said that the philosophy of paradox expressed in Zen and Chan Buddhism and “studies in cognitive sciences” influenced his thinking for Book From the Sky. For this reviewer, it’s the “cognitive sciences” bit that gives pause because it suggests that Xu has always borne in mind that there is an innate mechanism underlying the human ability to communicate using language.
Book From the Ground fully articulates these ideas and brings Xu’s work beyond the cultural constructs of Chinese and English. It is based on his extensive travels throughout the world and takes the form of an interactive computer installation and novel that follows the life of a person over 24 hours. Both the book and computer program express meaning based on a “language of icons” — pictorial symbols that Xu began collecting in 1999 from airplane safety manuals, which rely on image recognition to be understood. Today he has amassed a collection of more than 25,000 icons obtained from mathematics, physics, chemistry, musical composition and choreography — to name a few of the many fields of human knowledge that he draws upon.
“Our existing languages are based on geography, ethnicity, and culture (including all-powerful English), and all fall short. Written languages now face an entirely unprecedented challenge. Today, the age-old human desire for a ‘single script’ has become a tangible need. This predicament requires a new form of communication better adapted to the circumstances of globalization,” Xu writes in his artist statement.
It takes a few moments to get the hang of deciphering the 112-page novel. But once you get into it, the narrative, though simple, is easy enough to unravel. And from now until March 6, Eslite is holding a contest calling on participants to “translate” a chapter of the novel into a different language and send it to the gallery. Winners will be given an autographed copy of Xu’s novel (complete details and sample chapters can be found on the gallery’s Facebook page).
The interactive installation consists of two computers, one facing the other and separated by large monitors so that the interlocutor is hidden. Typing an English word, phrase or sentence into one computer produces icons of meaning on both screens. “Taiwan is not China,” for example, produces an icon of the ROC flag, the equals (=) sign, and the Chinese flag with an “X” through it. Though currently limited to English, Xu plans to eventually include Chinese as well as all the world’s major languages in the computer program.
Whereas Book From the Sky and Square Word Calligraphy use language in ways that intentionally make the construction of meaning difficult, Book From the Ground is an inclusive system that the average person can decode. Interestingly, the language of icons found in Book From the Ground bear a similarity to the lexigrams created for and used by Kanzi the bonobo (a chimpanzee) to communicate with humans. Is Xu echoing research in cognitive science that shows that the Tower of Babel’s foundation is in fact a biological mechanism that evolved over time? Xu’s studies in cognition suggest this might be the case.
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