Voiceover: I'm in the Metropolitan Museum of Art
with Allison Young.
We're in an installation
by the Chinese artist, Xu Bing,
called Book from the Sky.
Chinese characters are above us,
they're below us,
and they're on either side of us.
Voiceover: Pages containing columns and columns
of Chinese text are surrounding us on the walls,
hanging from the ceiling,
and also on the floor in the open book pages
from volumes that he has hand bound
in the form of traditional Chinese book art.
Voiceover: On either side of this gallery
are thousands of Chinese characters
printed on this beautiful paper.
Below us a sea of waves made up of open books,
and above us a beautiful billowing sky,
three long pieces of paper scroll-like
stretched across the ceiling
filled with Chinese characters.
Voiceover: To Western viewers,
it's not immediately clear what the text says,
what this piece might be about,
and it reminds me of other works
around the Chinese art galleries
in the Metropolitan Museum
of more historical, calligraphic arts.
Voiceover: But to a Chinese viewer
the meaning is also elusive.
Voiceover: This is because Xu Bing
has actually invented over 1,000 new characters.
Voiceover: So these are not real characters.
Voiceover: Because traditional Chinese characters
are composed in a modular way
meaning that different components
are brought together to form a character
in a block form.
Xu Bing actually uses some real components
and some that are invented
in combinations that are entirely new
to create a character that looks
extremely familiar to somebody
who can read Chinese.
Voiceover: We're surrounded by literally
tens of thousands of Chinese characters
that don't actually mean anything.
Voiceover: Xu actually discarded any characters
that he came up with that looked too inauthentic.
Voiceover: Xu Bing didn't render all
of these characters with a brush by hand,
rather he carved wooden blocks harking back
to the ancient Chinese system of movable type
which is far older than Gutenberg's system
in the West.
Voiceover: We're looking at a very early form
of mass production that relates
to the contemporary moment in which print media
have played a large role in Xu Bin's upbringing.
Voiceover: He was a young man during
the cultural revolution,
a period when intellectuals were vilified,
when the very notion of the individual
was distrusted,
when everything was about the group,
everything was about the State.
Voiceover: Xu Bing was actually very talented
as a child in writing and in calligraphy.
This skill was identified by teachers
and harnessed in service of the State.
So like many other young intellectuals,
he was sent to the countryside
where he was put to work creating
banners by hand for things like holidays,
weddings, and funerals where he would be asked
to combine modern and traditional
forms of calligraphy.
Voiceover: When Xu Bing was in art school,
he was trained in the art of propaganda
as was expected of anybody involved in the arts
at this time in China.
So it's fascinating with that in mind
to look at this overwhelming display
of block printing.
It admits no actual word.
Voiceover: The piece also makes me think
of a lot of other works of contemporary
Chinese art which used the act of destruction
in order to create new meaning
by way of dropping a Han Dynasty urn.
Other artists repeating a text in layers
that eventually obliterate its meaning.
Voiceover: We can't locate meaning in what we read,
so where do we look for meaning?
We're asked to move from the
symbolic representation of the words
to the characters themselves
and the accumulation of those characters.
Voiceover: As well as the vehicle
through which they're delivered.
We're reminded of the way that text is used
for propaganda purposes during Mao's regime,
and the inundation of posters and banners
that would have surrounded him
just like these texts surround us here.
Voiceover: But the irony is that this was produced
not during Mao's lifetime,
but in the period after when China was flooded
with Western literature.
And yet the artist has, nevertheless,
created characters that are empty of meaning.
Voiceover: He has observed two phases
of the consumption of texts in his lifetime.
The first being from the regime
through the use of propaganda,
and the second when China opened up
to receiving and translating Western philosophy,
theory, literature, and art history.
This was consumed by youths who were hungry
for information.
Voiceover: I'm struck by the way the books
on the floor create a series of waves
that almost seem like the sea,
and the banners that hang from the ceiling
function very much as the sky.
The title of this is Book from the Sky,
and the panels on the walls seem like landscapes.
Voiceover: This is an interesting observation
in light of the medium that we're looking at.
Mao considered wood block printed text
to be one of the most non-elitist forms of art
and communication because it was direct,
and because it could be mass produced
and widely disseminated.
Whereas, scholar painting earlier in Chinese history,
often depicted the landscape
and the natural environment,
but very subtle political messages
were sometimes conveyed in these compositions.
These were more elitist form of art.
Voiceover: Here we have subtle references
to landscape, but represented through text
emptied of meaning.