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Book from the Sky, Xu Bing
The work revives traditional designing, carving, and bookbinding styles and skills that have been all but lost in China, and extends the museum's preeminent collection of traditional Chinese calligraphy into the postmodern era. Regarded as one of the masterpieces of twentieth-century Chinese art,Book from the Sky helped the artist win the prestigious MacArthur Foundation Award.
Book from the Sky was begun in 1987, was first exhibited in 1988, and appeared in the notorious "China/Avant-Garde" exhibition in 1989, where China's artistic "radicals" first entered the National Gallery in Beijing on a grand scale. It incorporates four books, composed of some 4,000 Chinese characters that are wholly unreadable. A specialist in woodcut printing, Xu Bing designed each character-first making sure it did not exist-and carved it by hand. Using a font style from the fifteenth-century Ming dynasty, but with reference to still earlier printed styles, he carved characters as separate blocks and then arranged them in racks, two racks of characters per sheet. Each sheet is folded to make two pages; there are nine columns per page, and up to seventeen characters per column. Each double page sheet is folded along the centerline and stitch-bound. Six-hole stitching, a blank paper lining folded into each double-page, covered corners, and blue-dyed volume covers all derive from traditional Chinese bookbinding of the highest quality. Book from the Sky is a masterpiece of the bookmaker's craft and beautiful to behold.
The unreadable characters in Book from the Sky unite audiences everywhere in a forced illiteracy, but the characters are particularly frustrating to those who read Chinese. Xu Bing's "writing" (or non-writing) can be considered an abuse of lan guage, a reminder of how language is regularly abused by those in control of it, and a strike back at those who have themselves struck at the written word through modern political propaganda. While thoroughly contemporary in its politics and lin guistic implications, Book from the Sky also upholds the ancient Daoist belief that the deep est truths can never be captured by words alone.
Book from the Sky was begun in 1987, was first exhibited in 1988, and appeared in the notorious "China/Avant-Garde" exhibition in 1989, where China's artistic "radicals" first entered the National Gallery in Beijing on a grand scale. It incorporates four books, composed of some 4,000 Chinese characters that are wholly unreadable. A specialist in woodcut printing, Xu Bing designed each character-first making sure it did not exist-and carved it by hand. Using a font style from the fifteenth-century Ming dynasty, but with reference to still earlier printed styles, he carved characters as separate blocks and then arranged them in racks, two racks of characters per sheet. Each sheet is folded to make two pages; there are nine columns per page, and up to seventeen characters per column. Each double page sheet is folded along the centerline and stitch-bound. Six-hole stitching, a blank paper lining folded into each double-page, covered corners, and blue-dyed volume covers all derive from traditional Chinese bookbinding of the highest quality. Book from the Sky is a masterpiece of the bookmaker's craft and beautiful to behold.
The unreadable characters in Book from the Sky unite audiences everywhere in a forced illiteracy, but the characters are particularly frustrating to those who read Chinese. Xu Bing's "writing" (or non-writing) can be considered an abuse of lan guage, a reminder of how language is regularly abused by those in control of it, and a strike back at those who have themselves struck at the written word through modern political propaganda. While thoroughly contemporary in its politics and lin guistic implications, Book from the Sky also upholds the ancient Daoist belief that the deep est truths can never be captured by words alone.
