There have been a couple of people in touch with requests for more about
this. I've delayed while finishing an extended description of the book
viewed (in part) as a Chinese 'shanben' or 'fine ediition' (or 'rare
book'). I'm sending it to the 'British Poets' list and some individuals
who've expressed interest directly...
Skip to the 'Artistic/Critical Significance' bit if you're a bibliophobe.
[The 'strange characters' in *this* text *are* interpretable as (legible)
Chinese characters in Big-5 coding, if you have software to display them
*and* they survive their transit over the Net.]
}BGe--fC
Xu Bing: [TIANSHU. (A Book from the Sky). Beijing, 1991.*] 96; 69; 61; 76
folded leaves, Chinese-style. 4 volmes (ce). 46x30 cm (dimensions of the
case: 49x33x10 cm). Stitched, in a walnut-wood case.
A tour de force of conceptual, graphic and bibliographic art. This superb
production, by which we mean the creation of the entire limited edition of
one hundred copies of A Book from the Sky, is arguably one of the most
important Chinese art works of the century.
Background
Between 1987 and 1991, the young Chinese graphic and fine artist, Xu Bing
(born, Beijing, 1955), designed a 'vocabulary' of 4,000 characters which
appear, in terms of their graphic form and structure, to be Chinese, but
which are entirely illegible in terms of their linguistic signification.
None of them appear in Chinese dictionaries, and they do not relate to any
living or dead, spoken or unspoken language on earth. During the same
period, Xu personally carved (in reverse) the pear-wood type from which he
eventually hand-printed his Tianshu or Book from the Sky.
Although this artist's book directly flouts those conventions which allow
us to read the meaning of linguistic signs, it lovingly adheres to the all
the material-cultural conventions and forms of traditional Chinese
bibliography.
Extraordinarily, from the point of view of Chinese fine book production,
Tianshu was printed in wooden moveable type. Despite the fact that the
Chinese invented moveable type in the 11th century AD, because of the large
numbers of Chinese characters required for a working font, it was not
adopted as the usual method of composing and printing books. Printers found
it easier to continue with the practice of carving whole blocks of
characters from which each sheet (equal to a western 'opening') was
printed. Fine early editions printed by moveable type do exist. The most
famous recent example is the monumental encyclopedia, the Gujin Tushu
Jicheng *j- (printed 1713-22), a copy of which is in the British
Library. However this was printed using copper type. The contemporary
production of a fine, traditional style Chinese book in wooden moveable
type may well be all but unique.
Also extraordinary is the fact that, although he was already an extremely
accomplished graphic artist, known for his woodcuts, he taught himself --
with support from his librarian mother, and the surroundings and
collections of Beijing University and Library -- the printing technology
and bibliographic expertise which he required for the execution of Tianshu.
When he came to print the book at the Caiyuxiang Guji Shuchang
m|m*jy-t at Daxing j, he had to show the craftspeople there how to
go about composing and printing a book in moveable type. Workers and
managers at the factory were, he says, thrilled by the results (despite the
incomprehensibility of the content). Indeed, one of the challenges of
printing from moveable is even inking, since the type may vary minutely in
height. Tianshu shows remarkably even inking, because of the artist's care
in carving and also, perhaps, because the Caiyu factory was used to
reprinting books from old and worn blocks.
More Detailed Description
Each volume of the book is printed on folded leaves of zangjing g paper
(This is paper intended for the printing of religious, especially, Buddhist
'classics;' some copies -- to which we have not had direct access -- are
printed on yubanxuan * a more yellow xuanzhi ػ) The binding is of
the highest quality, although the style is that of a important canonical or
literary work, rather than an artistic or imperial indulgence (there is no
imperial yellow and no brocade).
Each of the four volumes is stitch-bound in the six-hole pattern reserved
for the best books, between blue-dyed paper covers with title labels. The
volumes have covered corners (baojiao *]). Each sheet is folded along the
central line of the block with the sheet edges bound into the spine in the
most common form of traditional Chinese binding, but the six-hole stitching
and the extra lining of each leaf (with a blank sheet bound inside the
folds), the covered corners, etc. all indicate the top-quality binding
which has been employed. The fold of the leaf and at the opening edge of
each volume is huakou f or 'decorated' with the various levels of
running title, single upper fish-tail, volume and leaf 'numbering,'
horizontal block rules and a series of single 'non-characters' (one for
each chapter) in the position where the surname of carver would be found.
Everything is in place.
The type-style of the work is in a Ming period, songti ߆. However, the
character count across columns and rows of each form has been chosen to
suggest earlier (religious) models from the Song or Yuan periods. There are
17 characters per column and 9 per row on each page. The dimensions of the
printed area (the form in this case or face of the block in a block-carved
book) are 32.5x47 cm, although when there are upper marginal notes (meipi
), these extend above the top horizontal rule.
In inside each volume there a cornucopia of traditional Chinese book-design
features often modelled on specific rare books which Xu Bing consulted (but
formally altered or subverted). According to the artist, these have been
arranged 'rhythmically' across and within the four volumes. Broadly, volume
one is straightforward, mostly standard text with little in the way of
commentary but with distinct divisions and headings; volume two has a
greater diversity of typographic forms, suggesting (medical?) reference
works; volume three has forms suggesting literary (poetry, 'three-character
classics,' biji ߃O in the final sections), religious (sutras) or
philosophical works; and volume four after returning to a run of standard
text with upper marginal notes, ends with a variety of appended glossaries
and vocabularies -- a character dictionary (where the upper marginal notes
go wild), a glossary of selected compounds, and a word list. At the same
time all the preliminaries and main parts of a complex work with multiple
commentaries and apparatus are represented in their traditional formats,
using varying sizes of type and design -- Chinese-style solid-block
'bullets,' systems of indentation, heading characters in reverse
(white-on-black) type, characters which clearly represent ordinal numbers
(perhaps the only construable characters in the entire text -- although
there are reports that one old scholar claims to be able to read two of the
non-ordinal characters), and so on. Various well-known standard sections of
a major work are easily recognized because of the typographic arrangements:
prefaces (xu ߫) for the entire work and also the separate volumes, tables
of contents (mulu *) the headings of which match up to chapters and
sections of the book; main text (zhengwen *), marginal notes (meipi
, printed in smaller type above the top horizontal rule of the block),
commentary in half-size type doubled between the vertical lines of the main
text and following each sentence which deserves such explication (jiazhu
߮`). Finally, the book also has a traditional colophon (ba [) cut out of
the column rules in a rectangular box on the last page. The last four
'characters' in the work are a beautiful arrangement in smaller type
'sealing' the colophon with a vague suggestion of the real character for
'to carve.'
All in all, the book offers the form of a major work, a 'Classic' or
'Collectanea' of Heaven, a work with a long exegetical history which has
deserved and received the close attentions of many scholars for a
millennium or more.
Artistic/Critical Significance
Xu Bing is associated with the 'New Wave of Fine Arts' movement which came
to pominence in mainland China during the mid-1980s. It was in 1987 that he
earned his Master of Fine Arts from the Central Academy in Beijing and
exhibited his earlier large-scale work, 'Five Series of Repetitions,' a
formalist exploration of woodblock printing which extended his mastery of
traditional woodblock techniques into the avant-garde practice of the New
Wave. However it was Tianshu which transformed him into major figure of
this new Chinese arts movement as well as establishing him, in the longer
term, as an artist of international reputation.
When the unfinished work was first exhibited in Beijing during October 1988
at the China National Gallery, it caused a sensation. Chinese intellectuals
and artists have been obsessed with the relationship of their
(potentially/problematically) modernist practice to the Chinese tradition.
Here was a work in which the material-cultural forms of the Chinese
literary and scholarly tradition are strictly, even lovingly, observed
while the system of meaning underlying those forms is just as strictly
denied. The Tianshu is a striking, beautiful, superbly-crafted, unreadable
paradox, while at the same time it is an eloquent contribution to a debate
which continues to rage amongst Chinese intellectuals and artists.
The importance of the work has been widely recognized, by western critics
and scholars (see, for example recent references in Craig Clunas's Art in
China pp. 220-22, and Michael Sullivan's Art and Artists of Twentieth
Century China, p. 288) as well as their Chinese counterparts. It is
interesting to consider the different ways in which the work, as displayed
or handled, is 'read' by its Chinese and non-Chinese audiences.
Educated Chinese readers can see immediately that the words of this fine
book cannot be read, but they often believe -- because its characters and
their 'framing' are, formally, so convincing -- that it must be legible to
someone, that it is, perhaps, in an as yet undeciphered script (such as the
Xixia L script, which the Tianshu characters vaguely resemble), or that
it is a secret or lost language, or a personal language of the artist.
Sometimes, therefore, they need to be reminded or 'reassured' of the fact
that this book really is unreadable. It should be stressed that this is not
a Chinese Finnegans Wake, this is not, for example, a deliberate confusion
of tongues, or of portmanteau words. The visual effect on Chinese readers
may be similar to that on Western readers simply looking at the text of
Finnegans Wake, but in Tianshu there are no construable linguistic
elements. The 'familiarity' of the characters is all a matter of
(calli)graphic form, although because of the 'high art' tradition of
Chinese calligraphy (which, of course, underlies traditional type design)
these formal meanings come closer to artistic meaning-creation than would
the graphics or typography of a similar exercise in a Western bibliographic
context.
Non-Chinese readers know they cannot read the book; and they don't expect
to have this ability. How, then, does the gallery installation of Tianshu
differ, for them, from the gallery installation of a perfectly legible,
equally fine, rare Chinese classic? Once more, a would-be 'reader' of the
Tianshu has to be reminded that any actual reading is impossible. Silently,
the book addresses the cultural distance between, shall we say, a literate,
educated Chinese audience and a non-Chinese audience, or, indeed, a
non-literate, uneducated Chinese audience. Both these classes of viewers,
those who are distant from the established, material culture of the Tianshu
because they are disadvantaged within their own society and those who are
distant because they are (linguistically, culturally, physically) outside
the 'Central Kingdom' are reminded of this distance when they are informed
(they have to be told!) that the Tianshu is unreadable; when,
paradoxically, they are made to realize that not even those who are
'inside' and at the 'centre' can read it.
Much more could be made of the work in terms of contemporary critical
theory than is appropriate here, except to suggest, briefly, that Xu Bing's
book maybe one of the greatest examples of 'applied grammatology' ever
produced.
Exhibitions and Collections
A Book from the Sky has been exhibited at installations in many galleries,
throughout the world. The first time it was exhibited in the West was at
the Elvehjem Museum of Art, University of Wisconsin-Madison November
1991-January 1992, together with a major retrospective of Xu Bing's work;
the most recent was at the Institute of Contemporary Art, London, during
May 1997. Copies of the book are in the collections of The British Museum,
the library of Harvard University, Queensland Art Gallery and in a number
of public and private collections in Japan.
*Note on the 'title,' place of publication and date. Above we give the, as
it were, the 'gallery title' of the work. Its actual title is,of course,
impossible to translitate, or to transcribe in any Chinese font surrently
available to us. See the reproduction of the title page for the actual
characters in question. Also, in a nice, ironic touch, on unsigned copies,
the space on the reverse title-page -- where a printer or publisher's
colophon may traditionally appear (especially on more modern books and
facsimiles), surrounded by a round-cornered box -- is left blank. On signed
copies -- in practice this means all copies which are sold and have left
the his possession -- this holds the artist's signature.
Selected References
Craig Clunas: Arts of China. Oxford: University of Oxford Press, 1997.
Russell Panczenko (curator): Three Installations by Xu Bing. Madison:
University of Wisconsin-Madison, 1991 (the catalogue notes are by Britta
Erickson).
Michael Sullivan: Art and Artists of Twentieth Century China. Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1996.
Much of the information above is based on interviews and discussions with
the artist undertaken by John Cayley during Xu Bing's visit to London in
May 1997.
> also here's some more on his:
Xu Bing: SQUARE WORD. An Introduction to Square Word Calligraphy and Square
Word Calligraphy Red Line Tracing Book. New York, 1996. 24; 14 pp. (2nd
volume with 8 additional lined pages, subtitled 'Square Word Calligraphy
Squared Paper Practice Book'.) 2 vols. 42x28 cm. Paper, in a thick paper
folder.
In his more recent work, Square Word Calligraphy, Xu Bing has devised a
method of writing English words in rectangular arrangements which resemble
Chinese characters. There is a code of calligraphic script elements which
map to the 26 roman letters, after which relatively simple rules for the
composition of the square words allow you to write English using Chinese
calligraphic principles. As a piece of conceptual (grammatological) art, Xu
Bing has composed and published a manual of 'Chinese-style calligraphy'
written entirely in these English 'square words' themselves -- it looks
like a Chinese book, but once the code is learned it is perfectly legible
as English -- along with a companion volume of calligraphic models for (ink
and brush) writing practice. (Books of this type are familiar and common in
Chinese educational contexts.) At his most recent exhibition at the
Institute of Contemporary Art in London multiple copies of this book were
installed in a classroom complete with teaching video, and gallery-goers
were welcome to try their hand at this new 'Chinese' way of writing
English. In his continuing work, the artist says he is interested to
produce more translinguistic/transcultural pieces which are also
(potentially) for everyday use; for example, a computer font for English
square words, where typing English words would generate square words on
your monitor and within your favourite word processor.
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John Cayley / Wellsweep Press http://www.demon.co.uk/eastfield/
1 Grove End House 150 Highgate Road London NW5 1PD UK
Tel & Fax: (+44 171) 267 3525 Email: [log in to unmask]
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