Interview with Xu Bing Xu Bing, one of the most prominent contemporary Chinese artists today, creates subtle and

complex works that defy easy interpretations. His works often deal with questions of tradition and the (im)possibility of knowledge, and are marked by a serious, technical dedication and a sharp focus, though the many layers at play can be elusive at rst sight. The art critic Alice Yang sees a fundamental tension in Xu Bings works; for her, Xu Bing simultaneously mourns and embraces the loss of meaning and the instabilities of knowledge. In this way, he returns again and again to the topos of a culture on the brink between ruin and regeneration.1 Born in Chongqing, China, Xu Bing spent several years during the Cultural Revolution working (and being educated) in a villageof which he has fond memories and later completed a degree in Traditional Print-making at the Beijing Central Academy of Fine Arts. His exhibition, A Book from Heaven (Tianshu), provoked such controversy in China after the 1989 Tiananmen Square incident that he emigrated to the United States. Based now in New York, he has produced numerous works, such as A Case Study of Transference (1993), Introduction to New English Calligraphy (1994), Tsan Series (1995), and Living Work, Monkeys grasp for the Moon (2001). Xu Bing currently has a full exhibition the rst ever for a living Chinese artistat the Sackler Gallery at the Smithsonian Museum in Washington D.C. For more information on Xu Bings works, please go to www.xubing.com

A BOOK FROM HEAVEN (text box) Xu Bing spent several years carving 4000 charactersthe number required for functional literacy in Chineseand printed them in a book. But the characters are all fake, invented by Xu Bing himself. Hundreds of identical books, all with the same fake characters, are opened up to different pages, while a giant scroll version of the book is hung from the ceiling and posters of these fake characters are afxed to the wall. Tianshu (A Book from Heaven) refers to patterns on the skin of a poor soul struck by lightning; the original title was Fenxi Shijie de Shu (A Book That Analyzes the World), but everyone referred to it as Tianshu.

Alice Yang, Xu Bing: Rewriting Culture, Why Asia? 24-29.

The characters lie on the cusp of legibility for Chinese readers, and this vague sense of familiarity creates a feeling of the uncanny among viewers. The art critic Alice Yang notes that Xu Bing stages the reappearance of the Chinese tradition....[His work] does not entail the reinvention of tradition as such, but rather the recognition of the impossibility of such a project.2 Carving these pseudo-characters gave Xu Bing great satisfaction and provided relief from the intellectual turmoil in 1980s China. As he said in an interview with Simon Leung, I was like a hungry person who, when he has the chance to eat, eats too much and gets nauseous. He also emphasized that he wanted there to be a tension between the seriousness of the execution and the presentation of the underlying absurdity that animates the project.3

NEW ENGLISH CALLIGRAPHY (text box) New English Calligraphy is a writing system invented by Xu Bing whereby alphabetic elements of English words can be written with a brush and stacked up together; an English word then takes the form of a pseudo-Chinese character. Each English letter is changed into a Chinese calligraphic form and grouped together into word-characters according to Chinese principles. This script appears Chinese (though the principle is remarkably similar to the Korean hangul script), and yet is entirely legibleafter some practicefor English speakers. Xu Bing has applied New English calligraphy extensively for recent works. A whole instructional book has been printed, entirely in New English, for the original installation, Introduction to New English Calligraphy. For Your Surname, please, Xu Bing prepared the New English equivalent for all the names of inhabitants of two cities in Spain and Japan, and allows them to print their names out in New English. Xu Bing has also explored writing calligraphy in New English, using Chinese and English poetry.

Alice Yang, Beyond Nation and Tradition: Art in Post-Mao China, Why Asia, 107-118.

Leung, Simon, and Janet A. Kaplan, Pseudo-Languages: A Conversation with Wenda Gu, Xu Bing, and Jonathan Hay, Art Journal 58, no. 3 (1999), 86-99.
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HIMALAYAN JOURNAL (text box) In depicting the Himalayas in Himalayan Journal, Xu Bing plays on the remarkable visual correspondences between writing and visual reality in certain Chinese characters. For example, rivers are painted with the ancient form of the Chinese character for water and forests drawn with the respective character for tree. These painting-writings can be seen/read, blurring the distinction between image and symbolwhich was in fact an ideal that has obsessed Chinese thinkers.

INTERVIEW WITH XU BING: Daniel Ho: A Book from Heaven (Tianshu) is a very complicated work, with a very difcult relationship with culture and tradition. How comfortable are you seeing yourself as part of a tradition? Or do you think you are trying to create a new tradition? Xu Bing: In the end, everything is a new tradition. What we do now will, in the future, be a tradition. My work does have a very special relationship with tradition; it is revolutionary from inside the tradition, though on the outside it looks very traditional. A Book from Heaven has many layers, many covers. I like giving people a false image; I like using masks and covers. New English Calligraphy is a case in point: it has a Chinese face but it really doesnt have much to do with Chinese culture. The outside and the inside are entirely different. The outside looks real, but it is fake; the inside, on the other hand, is empty. I like this confusion. My works present a lot of contradictions, paradoxes; I often take two opposing concepts, and between the two is where my works lie. Tradition and modernity, for example, are always used to talk about my works, but you cannot just approach them in a twodimensional way, either one or the other. It just doesnt work. For me, tradition and modernity are mutually penetrating: in the one is the other, and in the other is the one. There is not just one tradition or one modernity. Another analogy: they are like the two opposite ends [of the oating needle] of a compass, always in opposition but always in motionand in fact part of the same needle.

DH: You have said before that whenever people interview you, you think of the myth of Cang Jie from Huainanzi. Do you think of culture as a burden? [Note on the myth from Huainanzi: the mythical four-eyed sage, Cang Jie, invented Chinese characters for the Chinese people. This event shook the heavens and the earth: the heavens rained down grain and millet, fearing that people would abandon farming and devote themselves to idle pursuits and mutual deception, while the ghosts howled, afraid that people would start recording them and thereby control them.] XB: Not really a burden but a bit of a problem. I think people arent too clear about the problematic aspects of culture. There is so much belieftoo much and too trusting. I like the Huainanzi myth because there is a remarkable clarity in its view of culture. DH: Has the classical tradition been inuential in your life? I am thinking especially about the Daoist tradition. XB: Well, certainly by my generation, people in China werent educated in the classical way. No Laozi, no Zen Buddhism. Mao changed everything of course, even the stories and philosophy that were carried over into Maos China. So the culture I was growing up with was really Cultural-Revolution culture. But I think that many Asian people, almost in their blood, have a strong sense of Zen Buddhism. This is by nature, by blood, not really by education. In fact, after the Cultural Revolution, when we nally had a chance to read, I read David Suzukis book on Zen Buddhism Introduction to Zen Buddhism, I think. It is just a small, thin book, but it is amazing. Clear and beautiful. I always read this book, a bit like [how I used to read] Maos Little Red Book. But on reading Suzuki, I didnt feel that I had really learned anything from the book; I only felt that I had thought like that for a long time. He articulated clearly what I have felt. DH: How would you characterize the audiences relationship with A Book from Heaven? XB: I think the moment the audience walks into the gallery, they are really attracted to the work. The book is beautiful, serious-looking with serious information. It looks important with important lessons to tell. They are urged to read, and so they walk closer. But once in, they are stuck, they are pushed away.

DH:

It confuses people, certainly. But there is also a deep sense of fun and of absurdity.

XB: Yes, you really cannot say my work itself is serious; it is a big joke. But I always take my work seriously. I like to think that this makes the piece strong, because there are too many contradictions. Really, it is unbelievable that one person spent several years just to make a joke. The power coming from this, though, is great. This is something that runs through my workworking seriously at something that really doesnt seem to say anything or to have anything inside. This is how I engage with the audience. (....) A Book from Heaven really bothered many Chinese intellectuals in Mainland China and in Taiwan. They felt very uncomfortable in front of the work; it made them a bit crazyso many books, so many characters, and not one that they could understand. They had never really had that sort of experience. DH: Do you think Westerners who understand Chinese have the same sort of experience? XB: No, I dont think so. The reason is that there is a profound cultural difference between those raised in a culture based on Chinese characters [hanzi wenhua; Chinesecharacter culture] and those raised in another kind of culture. Those who dont understand Chinese characters dont really seem to see the signicance of A Book from Heaven. On the other hand, Westerners seem to see something else. When I emigrated to the West, I was very worried that people would not like A Book from Heaven; in fact, people loved it. I was quite surprised, I couldnt really understand why they loved it so much. In China, the fake characters of A Book from Heaven affected Chinese people too much; it shook their ways of thinking and their views on culture and language. Here in the West, people just feel that the work is beautiful. (...) Westerners miss parts of A Book from Heaven, but they also gain another part that people in China have ignored. And vice versa. DH: You have said that when you were carving the characters for A Book from Heaven (and also when you were sent to a village during the Cultural Revolution), you felt very at ease. You have called it washing your mind. XB: What I meant was that the mind is sometimes clouded after reading and absorbing too much. When I carve, I focus intensely on a very basic kind of movement. I feel like I am talking to nature, and my mind becomes clearer, sharper, and more sober.

What A Book from Heaven reects on is how much culture is a great big game machine. Once you are in this game machine, you cant quit. You feel tired. Whats ironic though is how A Book from Heaven in turn caused so much discussion, debate, and dispute. DH: For A Book from Heaven, you mentioned that you didnt want to do calligraphy, that it is too personal and too expressive. Yet now with New English Calligraphy and Himalayan Journal, you have been doing a lot of calligraphy. Is this a shift in thinking? XB: Not really. I had a specic aim in A Book from Heaven. With calligraphy, a bit of my personal emotions would have seeped in and there would be an accessible inside, or meaning, to the work. I wanted to cut off any meaning from the work; I wanted it to be empty. DH: You said that New English Calligraphy is about misunderstanding. But dont you think there is a possibility of understanding? XB: Oh, misunderstanding...thats just an old hobby of mine. Of course, New English can be used in real life, whereas the fake characters of A Book from Heaven do not constitute a system and do not have a principle of correlation between word and reality there is just nothing. But I think that New English and the fake characters do have a family resemblance, with the same father but different mothers (tongfu yimu). Writing (or script; wenzi) has dignity and honour. Normally, however, writing is used everywhere, on the streets, in the markets, and it loses its dignity and honour. You can use it anyway you want and you can even choose not to use it; because of this, you have control over writing. In A Book from Heaven, I cut off this common, pedestrian part of writing and left only the part with honour and dignity. Now this is something you can aspire to, but inside there is nothing. With New English Calligraphy, there is a regular writing system, so you can use it. The system isnt very efcient, and you can write words in many different ways. But they do have a personality. DH: On the other hand, you, as the artist, have no control over New English.

XB: Right. New English is like a cell that reproduces on its own but is uncontrollable. I feel very happy about this; I have started a cell and now this cell will turn into something else. New English is living. Already there is a phenomenon with New English: many teachers are interested in it as an educational tool to teach children about a foreign culture. Some others have made advertisements with New English one of them was for a London dealer of antique Asian furniture. I also have New English T-shirts, sold in museums with exhibitions of my work. DH: Lots of people have tattoos in Chinese characters. Any in New English yet?

XB: Actually, yes, in Spain mainly. I always thought that New English would be great for tattoos. There is a supercial sense of Chinese-ness and yet it is understandable. New English can also be used for the traditional Chinese seals that Westerners are so fond of buying. I believe that a Japanese company is working on this. Currently I am collaborating with a Japanese computer programmer to create a computer typeface for New English. This has taken a lot of time, but when its done, I plan to produce a newspaper in New English. DH: You had a plan earlier to publish A Book from Heaven in book form, complete with an ISBN. Is that still in the works? XB: Yes, I really want to do this. My idea, my dream at the beginning was to make a real book with an ISBN. That way, it could be collected by libraries and sold in bookstores and thus reach a widespread audience. Exhibiting A Book from Heaven and circulating it in book form would, I feel, have the same effect. The concept is open to repetition. And more people will feel the sense of unease and confusion. DH: Having lived in the U.S. for over ten years now, do you feel that you are losing touch with what inspires your workChinese culture? XB: DH: life? Not at all. It is all too easy to be sensitized to Chinese culture instead. You take your work very seriously. Do you think you put your work ahead of your

XB: Life, enjoyment....I feel that what I do is living; your life is what you do. Of course, my work comes with perks that I do enjoy very much, such as travelling. But right now, there

is a lot that I dont like, such as going to the museum to argue with the curator about the material, budget, or something else. I always have to explain my work. And I have to be on good terms with too many peopleit gets complicated. Sometimes you do your work well, but the budget is limited. You want to attain what you have conceived, but all that arguing is really too tiring. Of course you want to be without limits and deadlines. But you need a clear idea of what you are doing. I do feel satised, very happy actually. Doing what I think is worth doing gives me great pleasure. Overcoming the limitations, focusing hardthis is real work, this is enjoying life. But whenever I nish a work, I am not proud at all; I feel tired, almost daunted. It is only when working on a projectcarving characters or doing something elsethat I am the happiest. Once the work is done, I am back to the beginning again, faced with limits and deadlines.