The Book From The Sky By Xu Bing

Xu Bing is one of the most important Chinese artists in his generation. He is an artist that have created a new path for himself to express his art though unique styles. His art often reflects cultural issues and emphasizes around the constant reformation of the written language. Due to these concerns, Xu Bing constantly finds new ways to express something through his art work because he believes that every art should have a purpose and serves the audience. In this article, Britta Erickson provides an in-depth understanding of Xu Bing’s art by examining his entire career. In addition, the author portrays Xu Bing as an influential contemporary Chinese artist who provide a reflection of how language operate in the society and how his art successfully impacted a board audience.

For Xu Bing, calligraphy is a form of art where he can express his social and political message and the article highlights many of Xu Bing’s major work. Xu Bing significant work that involved language experimentation that Erickson analyzed was The Book from the Sky. For this art work, Xu Bing invented thousands of new characters where he used some real Chinese character components and some that are invented to create new character that looks familiar to people that can read Chinese . The general reactions was that people were in disbelieve that the text were unreadable and many people expressed emotional reactions such as sadness, oppression and wonder (5). His purpose was to evoke such feelings and portray the cultural oppression through his art work. In addition, his art welcomes individual interpretation of all audience from different background and allows everyone to read the false text with equal