Seeing some pages from "Tianshu" in an exhibition of modern chinese calligraphy at the British Museum many years ago was a turning point for me. (Below is the complete "Book from the Sky" installation, which took Xu Bing four years to make.)
I'd wanted to use some chinese characters for linocuts for an assignment for the illustration course I was taking at (then) London College of Printing. But you know how it is, you don't want them to say something unexpected. And suddenly, here were "nonsense" characters -- perfect for my project. While I was standing there drawing them, an elderly chinese-looking gentleman said to me in an American accent, "You know, I can read Chinese, but I can't make any sense out of this."That led me to wonder exactly why or how they could be nonsense, and to a week's intensive Mandarin course at City Lit - after which I had some idea of how the writing system works, and which left me wanting to be able to read Chinese. Well, first you have to be able to speak it and understand it... four years of classes and several years without have left me with fading traces of the language, and the ability to recognise only eight or so characters. Maybe in "retirement" I can get back to this; it certainly keeps the mind nimble.
Back to Xu Bing. He started with the woodcut, and had some wonderful work in the British Libary's "Chinese printmaking today" exhibition a few years ago. His "Book from the Sky" offended a lot of traditionalists when it was first shown, and he now lives in the USA, where he's done more exciting work using language and script, including "New English Calligraphy" - making English words look like Chinese ideographs.
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