A funny thing happened at Eslite Gallery (誠品畫廊) on Sunday. While I was translating the interview below, a woman wandered into the room where I was working to examine a large rectangular whiteboard covered in tiny circular magnets, which she obviously presumed was a work of art. As she moved in for a closer look, a gallery employee shooed her out of the room with a “nothing to see here” gesture. “NT$100,000 and it’s yours,” I said as she exited the room.
The woman’s misunderstanding would probably appeal to contemporary Chinese artist Xu Bing (徐冰) because she was forced to confront her own ideas of what constitutes an art object.
Xu, 57, has built his career on using art to snap us out of our habitual ways of thinking and perceiving. When Book From the Sky (天書) was first exhibited in China in 1989, for example, artists and intellectuals there couldn’t agree on what they were seeing. Conservative critics found his faux Chinese characters, printed on sheets of paper and bound in authentic-looking scrolls, blasphemous, his gesture tantamount to urinating on a revered literary tradition that had already received its fair share of disrespect during the Cultural Revolution.
Photo courtesy of Eslite Gallery
Avant-garde critics, steeped in conceptual art, yawned at the work, calling the pictographs pointless reimaginings of an outmoded past; by the early 1990s, if you weren’t hanging naked from a ceiling or cooking and eating a fetus, the thinking went, then you shouldn’t be bothering with art.
But time seems to have vindicated Xu’s work. Celebrated at home and often discussed in art circles abroad, Xu seamlessly integrates Chinese tradition with contemporary art concepts, while managing to transcend both. Along with Book From the Sky, which consists of more than 4,000 invented Chinese characters, Eslite Gallery is currently showing Xu’s Square Word Calligraphy (新英文書法), a work made of English-language text written to look like Chinese characters, and Book From the Ground (地書), a novel constructed out of icons. The Taipei Times caught up with a relaxed-looking Xu last week and discussed the works on display.
Taipei Times: Let’s first talk about Book From the Sky. How would you characterize the intellectual atmosphere in China in the years leading up to its production?
Xu Bing: The idea began in 1986, I started the project in 1988, and it was first exhibited in 1989. At the time, China was experiencing cultural fever (文化熱). The Cultural Revolution had just ended and there were many young intellectuals yearning to discuss questions of culture.
TT: China’s contemporary culture or traditional culture?
XB: Any culture. During the Cultural Revolution, access to anything outside of socialism was highly restricted or banned. Post-Cultural Revolution China saw the translation of books on modern Western philosophy — and these books were translated very quickly because, you know, there are a lot of Chinese. We also had access to and discussed books on classical Chinese [philosophy and art]. Book From the Sky was a response to this period.
TT: Is it fair to say that the shift from traditional characters to simplified characters during the Cultural Revolution also exerted an influence on your work, particularly Book From the Sky and Square Word Calligraphy?
XB: Absolutely. During the Cultural Revolution our teachers told us that traditional characters were no longer useful. Every semester, some traditional characters would be abolished and replaced by simplified characters. But then they would abolish the simplified characters that had just been introduced. This was an odd time for us because traditionally we Chinese believe that words are the creation of heaven; they are supposed to be respected, revered even. But when I was in school, it was okay to change them, which was truly an epochal shift. So having gone through this period, a seed was planted in me and those of my generation, that words are something that can be played with.
These early experiences left me with a profound understanding of the function and power of words. And my extensive practice of calligraphy enabled me to gain a deep understanding of the structure, beauty and expression of Chinese characters. This laid the foundation for Book From the Sky.
TT: How have your feelings about Book From the Sky changed since its creation and have you noticed a change over the same period in the way viewers perceive it?
XB: Reaction to the work has changed with time. Conservative critics [in China] were generally unreceptive when Book From the Sky was first exhibited. They thought it was too avant-garde. Paradoxically, new wave artists and conceptual artists thought it was too conservative, too academic. Contemporary Chinese artists think that art should shock — that it shouldn’t be too refined.
At the time, we were isolated and conservative [and] we looked to the West for new ideas of how to change our culture. The question, even today, has been how to infuse contemporary art with Chinese cultural traditions. How to make traditional culture relevant to today’s society is an acute problem in China right now. As China modernizes, people are asking if there is anything useful in traditional culture worthy of being preserved.
Chinese artists and intellectuals worship the West. In fact, anyone outside the US and Europe worships [Western] culture. But Book From the Sky is not very Western in that its seeds grew out of Chinese soil. And unlike the Western artistic tradition, which seeks to overthrow its predecessors, my work uses a Chinese attitude and methodology to examine contemporary issues. Today, Book From the Sky has become the most discussed Chinese work of contemporary art in the West’s cultural and art circles because it addresses these several layers of meaning.
TT: Whereas Book From the Sky and Square Word Calligraphy are grounded in a visual language that is quintessentially Chinese, Book From the Ground seems more universal, as though stepping outside of a particular cultural milieu. How did the project come about?
XB: I’ve spent a lot of time in airports and out of boredom began collecting icons. Airports use icons because written language isn’t required to unlock their meaning. One day I noticed three icons on a bubble gum wrapper that showed how to dispose of the wrapper. It occurred to me that I could use icons to write a novel. So from there I started collecting icons from different fields.
(Xu has since amassed a sizeable collection of icons, logos and insignia from fields as diverse as mathematics, musical composition and science.)
TT: And the project was born.
XB: Yes. I liked the idea because [unlike] Book From the Sky, which no one can read, Book From the Ground can be read by anyone. It doesn’t matter your cultural background and it doesn’t matter how educated you may be. Both books treat everyone equally.
TT: In interviews, you’ve remarked on your reading of language and science. Is there any relationship between these projects and cognitive science?
XB: Actually, scientists have been using Square Word Calligraphy to do testing to see how the brain functions. It turns out that readers of English use a different part of their brain than readers of Chinese. And I recently got a letter from Australia’s Department of Culture requesting the use of Square Word Calligraphy as part of their IQ testing system.
But what I find interesting is how our cultural concepts are changing. I come from a culture that uses pictographs to communicate. Chinese people are more sensitive to pictures and therefore icons because we’ve been reading pictures for thousands of years.
Our life today is of course much different than say 1,000 years ago. But language hasn’t changed that much over the same period of time. So words are stuck. On the other hand, even though icons are a contemporary phenomena, they are actually a kind of pictographic language. I often think that today’s world is entering into a new period of using pictographic language.
TT: Will you write another novel?
XB: I don’t have any ideas right now, but maybe young people will use this method to write their own.
(This interview has been condensed and edited.)
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