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Xu Bing - Coggle Diagram

- - - - Western Audience = think regular chinese writing
      - Chinese audience = surprised, dismayed, sometimes angry to discover they cannot read it
        
        most frustrating
      - unite all audiences everywhere in an induced illiteracy
      - may consider his work as an abuse of language
        
        reminder of how language has already been abused by those who are in control of it
      - wants work to be friendly and close to the audience
      - reassess the controlled discipline of brush handling
      - 'they thought some of the words were simply wrong. They realised that all the words were wrong. Their expected response was disrupted.'
      - 'all the responses are different. Chinese audiences lose part of the meaning, and Western audiences lose another part, but each side gets the part that the other doesn't'
    - - born 1955
      - believed 'written word was a weapon'
      - educated parents; persecuted as they were seen as a threat
      - sent to a farm (concentration camp) where he was forced to make communist propaganda
        
        had a talent for art as a young child
      - Tiananmen square massacre influenced Xu Bing to move
    - - Frames
        
        Postmodern
        
        Cultural
        
        reference to both chinese and western culture
      - Work
        
        4000 hand-carved and printed characters
        
        two racks of characters per sheet
        
        each sheet folded to make two pages, nine columns per page and up to seventeen characters per column
        
        each double page sheet = golded along the centreline of the rack and stitch-bound
        
        six-hole stitching, blank paper lining folded into each double page, covered corners, blue-dyed volume all derive from traditional finest chinese bookbinding
        
        many volumes to book of the sky
        
        volume two = medical reference texts
        
        volume three = literaery subject matter
        
        volume 4 = accompanied by hand carved storage box
        
        no intrinsic or universal meaning
        
        artist destroyed traditional characters
        
        wall texts, long printed banners hung from ceilings reminiscent of sutra scrolls and volumes of hand printed texts
        
        font style from 15th century Ming dynasty
        
        'book of the sky invites your desire to understand and it pushes you away at the same time.'
        
        'the work itself is empty. the work does not present any clear message'
    - - upholds Daoist belief that the deepest truths can never be captured by words alone
      - political revelation of the vulnerability and culpability of language > an aesthetic embrace of the principles of traditional writing
  - - - writing = record language and art form; books = conveyors of meaning > always occupied important place in Chinese culture
      - Follows and deconstructs the tradition of Chinese writing
      - uses language as a didactic tool to document and attribute meaning to an event rather than using text itself to convey meaning
      - language stereotypes cultural identity
    - - studied at Central Art Academy > specialised in woodcut prints
      - carves each character individually from wood like in the Ming Dynasty
      - combines components in non-conventional ways creating 'new' characters that do not have established meaning
      - new writing = Square Word Calligraphy
        
        used in other artworks > ART FOR THE PEOPLE 1999, 2000 WORK FOR SYDNEY BIENNALE
- - - - Mao hoped to create new culture that dispensed with the old but was not Western
  - - - questions the concept of communicating through language
      - installations demonstrate how meanings and words can be manipulated to become meaningless or misleading
        
        Mao Zedong simplified the traditional Chinese language for the sake of propaganda for the support of communism