Book From the Sky: the Repetition of Words (temporary translation), 1987-1991

The ‘Book of Heaven’ contains divine characters. Because of their divine character, they are unreadable to mortals. This could be an interpretation of Xu Bing’s magnum opus, which he began working on in the 1980s. Back then the artist set himself the goal of developing around 4,000 fictitious Chinese characters. The idea was that they should counter the approximately 4000 characters that are currently in use in China.

Xu used a traditional process for his book edition: a movable-type letterpress developed in China around the year 1000 (about 500 years before Gutenberg!).

In the work, shown in the ‘Mobile Worlds’ exhibition, Xu has overprinted several newspapers with his fictitious letters. The clever Western viewer may interpret this artistic act as a political allusion to censorship in today’s China. The problem, however, that Xu poses – to articulate something without having the expressions for it – is more fundamental than this.