Readable Unreadable

Took four years of time, the Chinese contemporary artist, Xu Bing, started creating A Book from the Sky 天书 since 1987. Xu designed a set of over 4000 Chinese characters for composing the book and produced them by using the printing process of the Song dynasty. Interestingly, the common usage of modern Chinese writings is also approximately 4000 words, which is similar to the number of characters that Xu crafted, yet his characters are entirely meaningless.

The imitation of modern Chinese writings, but in fake glyphs, reflects upon the role of language and literacy, thus extending to the matter of people’s interpretations of meaning and how they perceive the society. With language being the foundation of a culture, Xu seemed to provide another meaning to words, the extension of language. By composing meaningless characters, through their feature of being unknown, the artist destroyed our established idea of message delivery of literacy. However, such unknown of meaning of words gave rise to the open interpretation. Hung (1994) observed that interpreters of the book often make various associations regarding social, political or cultural context in order to grasp the unstated intention and meaning of it. To further dig deep the idea, Harper (2014) also stated that the way how people perceive the unknown in art can be used to judge their sensitivity towards certain issues. Even though the fake characters deconstructed the fixed role and function of words, they reconstructed meaning by the meaningless of language. A Book from the Sky acts as a mirror to reflect viewers’ inner mind, which also explains the reason for the varying interpretations and critical response at that time when the book was released, no matter in the aspect of political situation or cultural institutes.

Using the concept of the signified and signifier to explain, the book only destroys the signified as content, but not the signifier as form and meaning. (Hung 1994) Indeed, the artist himself also remarked that only to those people who cannot penetrate its meaning, the book is a piece of “nonsense writing”. (Taylor & Anderson, 1993) Xu’s words validate that viewers are the one who evoke of meaning of the book. I personally found such idea interesting since artists usually has their own established messages or certain context to deliver in their artworks, yet Xu twisted the way and placed the focus on how viewers identify the work. Interesting to note that the original Chinese title of A Book from the Sky is Tianshu and by Chinese, it refers to ancient passages full with lessons but in metaphorical style of writing which are hard to understand. Although Xu’s way of portraying Tianshu is unreadable, his work echoed the part of requiring viewers to participate and reflect upon the meaning behind the obscure characters. The installation hence is a perfect example to illustrate the essence of installation artworks as well.

Reference:

Harper, Glenn. "Exterior Form Interior Substance: A Conversation with Xu Bing." Sculpture 22, no. 1 (2003): 46-51.

Hung, Wu. “A ‘Ghost Rebellion’: Notes on Xu Bing's ‘Nonsense Writing’ and Other Works.” Public Culture 6, no. 2 (1994): 411–18. https://doi.org/10.1215/08992363-6-2-411.

Taylor, J. S., & G. Anderson. “Non-Sense in Context: Xu Bing's Art and Its Publics.” Public Culture 5, no. 2 (1993): 317–27. https://doi.org/10.1215/08992363-5-2-317.