Returned to lender The Met accepts temporary loans of art both for short-term exhibitions and for long-term display in its galleries.
Book from the Sky
Xu Bing Chinese
Not on view
This set of four books forms part of an eponymous installation first displayed in Beijing in 1988. The books contain four thousand invented characters that cannot be decoded, raising fundamental questions about the Chinese identity and its relationship to the written word. The artist believes that writing is the “essence of culture.” His subversion of it speaks to our need to communicate and the dangers of distorting or eliminating intended meaning.
Born in Sichuan Province, Xu Bing studied printmaking at the Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing. Book from the Sky and other projects have brought him considerable international renown. He moved to the United States in 1990 but returned to China in 2008 to teach at his alma mater.
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