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M+ Sigg Collection, Hong Kong. By donation, © Xu Bing
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Cissy Pui-Lai Pao and Shinichiro Watari Galleries, 229
Xu Bing 徐冰
Book from the Sky 天書
1989
Book from the Sky combines three elements of great importance to Xu Bing: books, scripts, and the printing process. Starting in 1987, Xu, trained as a printmaker, created over four thousand false Chinese characters based on the character-making rules of the Kangxi Dictionary and the Song typeface commonly used in official documents. Over the next four years, he followed the procedure of movable type printing, from type-founding to typesetting,and complied with the logic and structure of books as well as the design of stitch-boundbooks.He ultimately created 120 four-volume collections of ‘ancient books’—real books that cannot be understood by any reader—presented in handmade walnut wood boxes. Book from the Sky directly comments on China’s social institutions and cultural context of the 1980s, from the perspectives of textual and linguistic systems and knowledge production and dissemination.
The Weight of Lightness: Ink Art at M+. M+ Pavilion, Hong Kong, 13 October 2017–14 January 2018
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