UCCA: As you walk through the exhibition’s entrance, you are immediately enveloped by a different kind of text, namely Xu Bing’s Book from the Sky. To a Chinese speaker, these characters seem familiar from a distance, but up close become illegible. The work is composed entirely of fake characters. Xu Bing created these words using the structures and components of Chinese characters. However, it differs from the puzzle-like experience of his Square Word Calligraphy. Book from the Sky is the artwork that first brought Xu Bing fame on the international stage.

Xu Bing: One day in 1986, as I was thinking about something else, the idea came to me to make a book no one could read. The idea thrilled me. In July of the following year, right after my graduation exhibition, I quickly started on this “book.”

From the very beginning, I had a few clear thoughts on how I would make it. First, it would not have the most essential quality of a book: though it would still strongly resemble one, it had to be entirely devoid of content. Second, the process of making it had to be identical to that of an ordinary book. Third, each step of its production and all of its details had to be precise and meticulous.

I knew that the fate of the piece depended on the attitude I brought into making it, and that the work’s artistic power lied in creating a counterfeit that seemed realer than real.

I decided to create over four thousand fake characters—that’s the number of characters you need to read most normal publications. If you know more than that, then you can read, and you are considered an intellectual. My requirement was that these words resembled characters to the largest extent possible without actually being characters. Their internal structures had to accord with the rules that govern actual Chinese characters.

UCCA: After mastering the techniques of movable type, Xu Bing carved over 2,000 fake characters by the latter half of 1988. What is now the National Art Museum of China presented this first version in October. He titled the show “Xu Bing Print Exhibition,” emphasizing the importance of “printing” to this work.

Xu Bing: The name of the work was originally A Mirror that Analyzes the World: The Final Volume of the Century. I came up with such a ponderous title because I was so preoccupied with “profound” questions back then. Later, people started referring to the work as Book from the Sky, and I thought that worked better. The exhibition shocked viewers, and many people outside the art community came to see it. Traditionalists criticized the artwork as too radical. They said it was like “ghosts building a wall,” meaning that this art and the artist’s thinking were flawed. The avant-garde, on the other hand, said it was too traditional, too academic.

UCCA: Although the exhibition provoked heated discussions among the critical community, to Xu Bing this only confirmed the form the book should take. He decided to change the scale of the work, spending over a year carving another 2,000 characters, for a total of over 4,000. This time, he did not employ oil printing, but found a factory on the outskirts of Beijing that specialized in producing ancient books. This second round of carving and printing lasted two years.

Xu Bing: In all, we printed 120 sets of Book from the Sky. Each set contains four volumes, totaling 604 pages. Each set was put into a walnut wood box made by an old carpenter from Handan in Hebei province. The piecemeal nature of the work delayed its completion; it was finished in the fall of 1991. I had moved to the United States in July 1990. Those days, when you went abroad, you were never sure when you would come back. Before I left, the binding sample was completed, and I decided on the color and format of the cover, among other details.

Book from the Sky is a contradictory object filled with paradoxes. People call them “characters,” but they lack the essential function of real characters. They say it’s a “book.” Though it resembles one superficially, it cannot qualify as a real book. Its surface and depths are completely different. It combines the hyperreal and the abstract. It is both serious and absurd.

Looking back, I wonder what I did from 1987 to 1991. All I can say is, a person used four years to make a thing that said nothing.

UCCA: As you enter the Great Hall, you’ll see a group of artworks Xu Bing produced in the Beijing countryside and at the Central Academy of Fine Arts, where he studied. In 1974, having grown up on the campus of Peking University, Xu Bing followed a national policy and moved to one of the poorest areas on the outskirts of Beijing to work on a farming commune.

Xu Bing: At the time, there was a saying: young intellectuals needed the countryside, and the countryside needed them.” One had to come up with clever ways to use one’s knowledge. I could write and illustrate blackboard bulletins, and these bulletins grew over time into a mimeographed magazine, Brilliant Mountain Flowers. This was the result of bringing local farmers and the sent-down youth together to do artistic things. I was the art editor, in charge of the graphic design and engraving stencils out of wax paper. Although I didn’t edit the content, I was very interested in fonts. There were eight issues in total, and the first issue was sent to an exhibition celebrating the results of the Criticize Lin, Criticize Confucius movement. The magazine is now seen as an early work of mine. It’s not in a museum to criticize Lin Biao and Confucius, but because of its intricate, beautiful craftsmanship.

UCCA: As a child, Xu Bing dreamt of studying at the Central Academy of Fine Arts. After the university entrance exams were reinstated in 1977, he was admitted to the academy’s printmaking department after a few false starts. The academy resumed its practice of teaching figure drawing with plaster figures and live models, launching a new era in Chinese art education. Xu Bing dedicated himself to sketching and copying plaster figures. Yet he retained a love of the countryside, as seen in his woodcut series Shattered Jade.

Xu Bing: After learning the fundamentals of woodcutting, I carved more than a hundred prints that were small enough to fit inside the palm of your hand. I tried all the Chinese and Western cutting techniques that I was exposed to. I never thought that these exercises would become the earliest works of mine to influence the art world. These are plain and sincere works. Looking back, I’m struck by their innocence. Perhaps people liked them because they were looking for some sort of real sentiment after going through the Cultural Revolution. The artworks were different from Scar Art; instead of accusing the past, they cherished the ordinary joys of our previous lives. They made such a deep impression on the art community that later, many people asked: how could Xu Bing also make Book from the Sky?

Today, these old artworks are really a bit basic. They can’t compare with those of woodblock printing students now, in technique or in concept. But the good thing about them is their earnestness. They reflect the efforts of a person at a particular stage in his life. Recently, art institutions around the world have expressed interest in my early prints. I think they’re trying to find the origins of and context for my later work.

UCCA: As you move through this room, you’ll next see the print Five Series of Repetitions. This piece represents a crucial turning point, linking his early works to the more experimental art that came after.

Xu Bing: In the mid-eighties, I began to question my past work. This began when I went to see the “North Korean Art Exhibition” at the National Art Museum of China. Most of the works depicted smiling North Korean workers, farmers, and soldiers surrounding Kim Il-Sung. This exhibition was an opportunity. It was like looking in a mirror: it reflected all the dead-end parts of the artistic tradition I was working in. I decided to break free and create a new kind of art. At the time, people in mainland China had a very limited understanding of modern art. One day, I saw Andy Warhol’s series of repeated black-and-white silkscreens in World Art magazine. That was when I became interested in this idea of “repetition.” For the next few years, I began exploring “repetition,” making it the topic of my master’s thesis.

UCCA: It occurred to the artist that the serial nature of printmaking gave it a “contemporary” quality, similar to communications technology, advertising, and the internet. All these media transmit information by “reprinting” the same content, so to speak. In Five Series of Repetitions, he makes visible each step of the printmaking process, playfully exploring the many potentials of this craft. It also anticipates his later artwork Book from the Sky in its technique and concept.

The film projected here documents the making of Ghosts Pounding the Wall. In the next room, you will see this monumental installation in its entirety, along with another film depicting its reception in the United States. Ghosts Pounding the Wall was the last artwork that Xu Bing began before emigrating to America.

Xu Bing: The city felt stifling, and people were criticizing Book from the Sky. I knew I was going to move soon, and I had no idea when I would come back. I decided to realize an old ambition of mine—to make a rubbing of a giant natural object. At the time I had this idea, that any textured object could be transferred onto a two-dimensional plane and made into a print. People have called this the largest print in the world.

I was young then. My ambition was big, so the things I made were big.

In July, I took Book from the Sky, Ghosts Pounding the Wall, and two scrolls from Five Series of Repetitions with me to the US. I basically spent the following ten or so years making and exhibiting artworks in different parts of the world.

UCCA: After moving to the United States, Xu Bing’s interest in and sensitivity toward writing only grew. He turned his creative attention to the English language, as well as questions of cross-cultural and linguistic transference. The calligraphy classroom you see here is his most iconic work from this period, Square Word Calligraphy.

Xu Bing: When I moved to the US, language and communication became immediate problems. They form an awkward relationship with your life: your thinking is mature, but your speech and expressive abilities are those of a child. Your roots are deep in the Chinese language, but you are required to use an unfamiliar vernacular. I have always been interested in words; in China, I made work that dealt with Chinese characters. After going to America, I kept thinking about if it would be possible to use English to make things. I tried many experiments. This attempt to grasp the unique attributes of different languages helped me understand cultural distinctions. These differences were my motivation as I imagined how to “graft” them onto one another.

After I came up with the idea for an English Square Word Calligraphy, I tried my hand at writing it. To be honest, my first attempts weren’t much to look at, not because I lacked calligraphy training, but because I was the first person to try to write this way. When writing, I would think of English letters while keeping in mind the particular brushwork of Chinese calligraphy. I had never used my mind and my hand in this way before. But this ugly calligraphy did record the history of a person’s thoughts as he struggled with, and reconciled, two different systems.

UCCA: Since the creation of his new writing system, Xu Bing has often used it in his calligraphic works. Its popularity grew as he exhibited it around the world: schools have started classrooms for his calligraphy, and there are even companies that have used it in job interviews, testing the applicants’ mental versatility. Xu Bing enjoys how Square Word Calligraphy can be easily written and reproduced outside of the art world.

Xu Bing: This piece is a response to linguistic and cultural conflicts. Yet in truth, it’s not just about cultural exchange, communication, and the meeting of East and West. I was really interested in changing people’s innate modes of thought by hinting at a new perspective.

UCCA: Apart from the classroom, as you walk into the back corner you will see other language-based works from around the same time. On the far wall is A, B, C…, the first piece Xu Bing made after moving to the US. Nearby is Post Testament, a book that combines the Bible with a popular novel, alternating words. These early experiments are an important artistic foundation for many of Xu Bing’s later works, reflecting his varied interests and interdisciplinary vision.

UCCA: Despite his experience working with text, Xu Bing here presents a book containing no words, only symbols. It is a book that everyone can read. The installation of Book from the Ground imitates Xu Bing’s New York studio. A close look reveals many of the original materials and drafts that he collected, organized, researched, and ultimately used to produce this work.

Xu Bing: Airport indicators and safety manuals are all based on pictograms. They convey complex things using a minimal number of words. Such indication systems can be said to be humanity’s first “universal” text. This really appealed to me.

UCCA: The ideal of transcending textual barriers is something humanity has never stopped working toward. In the wake of globalization, and with the arrival of a new age of images, Xu Bing realized that there already was a language of graphics that was constantly growing.

Xu Bing: My interest in Book from the Ground lies in the degree to which graphic symbols can be as expressive as writing. I understand, of course, that compared to mature languages their potential is limited. They’re fit to express some things; they fail in others. But I’ve become more and more convinced that we have only scratched the surface of their full potential. It’s impossible to calculate how many pictographic symbols there are today, and more are being produced at every moment.

Twenty years before, I made Book from the Sky, a book that no one could read, not even me. Here I’ve made a book that anyone can read, no matter what language you speak. In truth, these books are completely different, but they have something in common: no matter what language you speak, no matter whether or not you are educated, they are equal to every person on the planet. Book from the Sky expresses regret and vigilance towards existing writing systems; Book from the Ground expresses my views on modern textual trends and my dreams of a universal language. I know this ideal is quite large, but the significance lies in the attempt.

UCCA: As you enter this room on your right, you will find another series of works centered on writing. The piece on the outer wall is named Lost Letters. Xu Bing completed this work for the Asian Fine Arts Factory in Berlin in 1997. It records traces of the factory’s history as an underground publishing house of the German Communist Party, as well as the artist’s considerations of text, history, and memory. To him, “Writing is one of the fundamental elements of our notion of human culture. To interact with writing is to interact with the root of culture.” Similarly, understanding the origin and development of Chinese characters means getting at the core of Chinese culture.

The hanging sculpture Monkeys Grasp for the Moon and the series of preparatory drafts shown here are the product of a word game Xu Bing plays with the word “monkey” in several different languages. Continuing to the back wall, you’ll see two pieces that resemble classical artworks, Mustard Seed Garden Landscape Scroll and one of Xu Bing’s “Landscripts.” These works are meditations on the culture of Chinese characters, in particular the common roots of Chinese painting and calligraphy.

A trip to Nepal in 1999 rekindled Xu Bing’s interest in pictographs. On this excursion, he picked up his sketchbook once again. As he looked to a mountain, he would draw using the Chinese character for mountain, thereby making a series of landscape paintings composed of characters.

Xu Bing: At the time, I could forget about discussions of style and brushwork in calligraphy and painting. I felt I’d reached the core of our culture, its most unique part. Everyone knows about the shared origins of calligraphy and painting, but what they mean is a stylistic relationship. Yet what I felt was a semiotic connection between them. I composed landscape paintings with words: a mountain, an expanse of water, a tree. I found that together, those characters seem like the drawing techniques of the Mustard Seed Garden Manual of Painting from the Qing Dynasty. To me, the Manual was like a dictionary filled with component parts from renowned artists and their works. Students learned to paint the same way they learned to write, through rote memorization. Once these symbols were internalized, students could use them to “write” everything in the world. The core component of Chinese culture is the categorization of the world into symbols. This is why Chinese painting stresses copying from books rather than drawing from nature. These basic drawing techniques of texture and mark-making are all symbols that rely on memory, not depiction. This is how our culture was passed down.

UCCA: Here you’ll also see the hand-drawn animation The Character of Characters, which tells the stories of different Chinese character compositions as well as how these pictograms have changed throughout history. It explores the relationship between the writing of characters and Chinese culture.

UCCA: Welcome to Xu Bing’s zoo of art. This room testifies to the many animal collaborators that the artist has worked with throughout the years.

Xu Bing: I started using live animals in my work in 1993. I had just moved to New York and hoped to make art that would shock people. In so doing, I could both assimilate into and challenge Western contemporary art. My sense at the time was that human creativity was limited, and I hoped to empower humans with the help of animals.

Looking back on it now, A Case Study of Transference is not a mature work. For me, it was more like a practice sketch. Understanding and attempting radical creative techniques isn’t a bad thing; it enriches and expands your creative language, and pushed me to reflect on the current state of contemporary art.

Animals and words are two completely different “materials.” I’m not interested in exploring either of them per se, but in using them, in discussing what lies between them. Animals can be said to be an icon of primitive or wild things, while words are the most basic conceptual element of culture. A Case Study of Transference is totally different than Book from the Sky in style. However, they are talking about the same thing: the relationship between people and culture.

UCCA: Another performance installation using pigs is Panda Zoo, for which Xu Bing put panda masks on two black-and-white Hampshire pigs and placed them in a gallery surrounded by an environment reminiscent of an elegant landscape painting.

Xu Bing: Two live pigs in New York’s SoHo District are a rare sight. Children would come to the gallery to feed them, and they grew up healthy and strong. Sometimes they would take off each other’s masks, returning to their true selves. Like my other works, this installation suggests the notion of a mask.

UCCA: Silkworms are another key player in Xu Bing’s animal works. Every summer from 1994 to 1998, Xu raised silkworms in the US and used them to complete a number of artworks.

Xu Bing: Specifically, I would like to talk about American Silkworm Series: The Opening. This installation was completed in 1998 in New York. At UCCA, viewers can see photographic documentation of this work. The installation was born out of our limited production capabilities. In the New York show, I initially planned to set up an ordinary living space and fill it with silkworms spinning silk. As the opening of the exhibition approached, however, the worms gave no indication that they were going to spin. There was nothing I could do. In my agitation, I came up with an idea: I stuck mulberry branches into a large vase and placed it in the center of the museum. During the opening, hundreds of silkworms began eating the leaves, and soon only bare branches remained. Shortly after, the worms began spinning silvery cocoons, which gradually filled the branches during the exhibition period. The verdant bouquet became a different kind of beautiful image. The artwork was technically simple, but I think it contains a certain philosophical richness. It realizes my desire to bring Eastern modes of thought to bear on contemporary art.

UCCA: As you enter this room filled with the scent of tobacco, you will see a series of artworks related to cigarettes. For Xu Bing, tobacco represents an opportunity to evoke a variety of cultural and historical memories.

Xu Bing: In 1999, I went to Duke University to deliver a lecture. When I arrived in Durham, I could smell the tobacco in the air. A friend told me that the Duke family made its fortune in cigarettes, and that Durham is also known as a “tobacco town.” It’s also called the City of Medicine because of its cutting-edge cancer treatments. There is an interesting relationship between tobacco and the culture here, so I started thinking I could perhaps make art using tobacco.

I began collecting research material and conducting interviews. From the Duke library’s many resources, I learned about the Duke family’s historical connection to China. They were the first to bring cigarette rolling technology to Shanghai. I then thought to bring this project to Shanghai. Four years later, I realized “Tobacco Project 2: Shanghai,” curated by Professor Wu Hung. In 2005, I started learning about the history of tobacco in Virginia. There, tobacco was closely connected to the first settlers in the American mainland. Virginia is the now production center of Marlboro cigarettes. In 2011, I completed “Tobacco Project 3: Virginia.”

UCCA: The exhibition showcases fifteen pieces from the Tobacco Project. Most prominent is the tiger-skin carpet in the center of the floor. Above is a reproduction of Along the River During the Qingming Festival, traversed by a half-burned cigarette. In the back corner is Tobacco Book, made literally of tobacco leaves. Xu Bing uses these different methods to raise questions about the values and judgments that surround the issue of tobacco.

Xu Bing: Tobacco has the power to permeate all spaces. It ultimately becomes ash, linking it with every person and the surrounding world. There are so many profound materials used in the production of cigarettes, and the materials connected to it are endless. Making this work was like opening Pandora’s box.

Xu Bing: This is a project about the growth of trees. The core concept of the Forest Project is a self-sustaining cycle. First, we encourage children to draw trees. We then auction these drawings online and use the profits to grow real trees. This system integrates regional art, educational research, and environmentalism. It began in Kenya over ten years ago, and has since travelled to mainland China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Brazil, and India. I hope that the Forest Project can spread like seeds around the world.

I want everyone who participates in this project to benefit from it. My reward was what I learned when I imitated the kids’ drawings. The children’s benefit was not just to learn about art, but to see their works transformed into reality, and to understand how an ideal can come true.

I didn’t conceive of this project as an artwork, but it ended up touching upon some of the core issues in art. How can art move forward and extricate itself from contemporary dilemmas? What art forms are most suited to the present day? Where does inspiration come from? Profound concepts must take a back seat when measured against questions of the public good. Perhaps it seems unrelated to art, but only if our work maintains a certain distance from established art systems can we breathe new life into these institutions.

UCCA: At the end of the walkway, you will see two artworks. In the small glass container is a sample of air taken from Beijing during the SARS outbreak. Air Memorial is Xu Bing’s unique way of preserving this historical event.

The other artwork in the hallway is Magic Carpet, created for the Singapore Biennale. Can you read the text emblazoned in the center? It is the English word “belief,” written in Square Word Calligraphy. The carpet was originally designed for the Kwan Im Thong Hood Cho Temple. Besides the one exhibited here, Xu Bing created two other versions. However, because it is forbidden to step on sacred Buddhist texts, the other two carpets were never shown in Singapore. The drafts and installation views from Xu Bing’s Taipei retrospective on the wall record the difficult process of its production, and the artist’s respect for different religious beliefs.

UCCA: In front of you is a landscape behind a translucent glass screen, lit from within. It is Xu Bing’s rendition of Song Dynasty painter Guo Xi’s Flat Trees, Level Distance, which depicts a pastoral, late-autumn scene. As you continue to the right, you will see another key work, Where Does the Dust Itself Collect? The thin layer of dust that covers the ground was collected by Xu Bing in Lower Manhattan in the wake of the 9/11 attacks.

Xu Bing: Dust contains an infinite amount of content. It exists in the most fundamental, inert material state. It cannot become anything else. How could the World Trade Center be reduced to dust in an instant? Returning to this primitive state implicates many political, ideological, and religious conflicts. But sometimes I wonder whether there is another, overriding reason: once an object becomes the focal point of so much manmade, material energy, it is destroyed by its own energy. Or in other words, this energy is used until it transforms into a self-destructive force. Catastrophes like these are often the result of a loss of balance between competing interests and political bodies. But a deeper loss of balance is humanity’s transgression against nature. The 9/11 attacks were an essential warning to the human race, and I hope this artwork can make people realize this.

UCCA: After the artwork was first exhibited, it drew both praise and controversy. Many reviews were focused on the 9/11 attack itself. Museums got in touch to ask if they could buy some of the dust. To the artist, the piece doesn’t really explore 9/11 per se, but rather the relationship between materials and a spiritual realm.

As American author Andrew Solomon once noted, “In the last decade’s interminable and fruitless debate about a ‘freedom tower’ and a monument to 9/11, no one thought to note that the monument was already there: it was the dust itself.”

When you are done looking at this work, please continue walking behind Background Story. Do you now see the trick to this work? The landscape painting is actually an assortment of cardboard, branches, and other odd materials. Xu Bing began the “Background Story” series in 2004. He made this edition especially for this exhibition. Like a magician, the artist only lets you in on the secret after charming you with the spectacle.

Xu Bing: When an object comes into direct contact with the back of the frosted glass, the front side will reveal a clear image of the object. When they are separated, the view from the front is blurred, much like the way depth is rendered in traditional Chinese landscape paintings. The artwork depends on these controlled spatial relationships. This is a painting of light: the image is not the result of the manipulation of ink, but of light itself.

UCCA: Here you find yourself at the final stop of the exhibition. In 2008, Xu Bing was invited back to China to serve as the vice president of the Central Academy of Fine Arts. Phoenix was the first work he created after his return. The materials used to construct these two large-scale phoenix sculptures are all reclaimed from discarded building materials, a byproduct of China’s urbanization. On view here are materials related to the creation of Phoenix alongside a seventeen-minute documentary on the making of the work.

The other piece you see here is Dragonfly Eyes, Xu Bing’s newest work completed in 2017. The dragonfly has more eyes than any other insect. Each of its compound eyes consists of thousands of smaller ones. The first feature-length film the artist has ever directed, Dragonfly Eyes is edited from footage taken by thousands of surveillance cameras—just like the eyes of a dragonfly. The entire gallery is transformed into a giant surveillance camera, with additional security footage livestreamed onto computers in the hallway outside this room.

This is a movie made without actors or cameramen. However, Xu Bing jokingly notes that “In China, our cameramen are ubiquitous.” The two main roles, Qing Ting and Ke Fan, are not played by “actors,” but are embodied, at any moment, by random passersby swept into the story. As the narrative proceeds, the audience might begin to doubt what they see—are these different people, or the same people? This fictional story, composed of real surveillance footage, blurs the boundary between reality and fiction.

Apart from the nine-minute trailer for Dragonfly Eyes, UCCA also exhibits the script, raw footage collected by the studio, a documentary on how Xu Bing acquired the rights to use the likenesses of the characters, and other preparatory materials.

During the exhibition, Dragonfly Eyes will be screened every day from Monday to Friday at noon in the UCCA Auditorium. Visitors can learn more about the screening schedule at the front desk.