NEW YORK, NEW YORK
Xu Bing: An Introduction
In his elaborate installation, Square Words–New English Calligraphy, Xu Bing transforms the gallery into a classroom. Conforming to a rigid grid, fifteen two-person desks are squarely oriented to the front of the room where a video monitor displays an instructional tape with Xu himself demonstrating the techniques of Chinese calligraphy. However, the language he inscribes with a brush and ink is imaginary. His simulated ideograms are actually composed of English letters, which, when read left to right and top to bottom, comprise English rather than Chinese words. Gallery visitors are invited to learn Xu’s language by tracing the radicals that make up the ideograms in delicate handmade copy books supplied, along with brushes and ink, at the desks. There, they discover they are writing familiar phrases, such as “three blind mice,” in an unfamiliar hand. Housed like precious antiquities in vitrines at the back of the classroom are flat stones, each sandblasted with an ideogram. These, along with hundreds of other stones, are the source of graphite rubbings on massive sheets of rice paper, which are gently draped on the walls. In Xu’s synthetic language, these ideograms spell English first names. With a little effort, his text is intelligible to those who read English, but it remains incomprehensible to non-English speakers, to some of whom the ideograms might at first appear to communicate.
Xu’s conceptual, language-based work calls attention to the fallibility of cross-cultural linguistic communication. It also foregrounds prejudices and preconceptions based on appearances, since most westerners will assume that the foreign appearance of the text (or, by extension, a person’s appearance) denotes a foreign language or purpose—that of the “other”—which is implicitly objectified. Other works by Xu, including A Book from the Sky (1987–91), a massive undertaking for which the artist invented four thousand meaningless Chinese characters, and Brailliterate (1993), combining various found Braille texts with an English-language title (“New World Translation of the Holy Scriptures”), also investigate the relationship between language and knowledge. He provocatively extends the concerns of 1960s Conceptualism by acknowledging the shortcomings of its reliance on language, which is available only to informed speakers and cannot transcend cultural limitations. But where Conceptual art was often condemned for its reluctance to confront real-world issues, Xu examines the ideologies of formal education and acculturation to uncover the building blocks of society. Having lived through the radical jolts of the Cultural Revolution and the massacre in Tiananmen Square, Xu informs his work with the desire for freedom, equality, and respect basic to all people of the world.
Frances Colpitt
Square Words–New English Calligraphy. Detail
Square Words–New English Calligraphy, 1996. Desks, chairs, rice paper books, brushes and ink, rubbings, and video. Detail (reads “GARY”)
Square Words–New English Calligraphy. Installation view
