Xu Bing

Language itself is subject to the same dynamics of transformation, as Xu’s magical installation The Living Word (2001; Lot 150) makes beautifully apparent.  Originally created for the exhibition Word Play:  Contemporary Art by Xu Bing at the Arthur M. Sackler Gallery of the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C., The Living Word consists of more than 400 carved acrylic characters in a rainbow of colors and is an extended meditation upon the relationship between words and their referents, historical origins and subsequent transformations.  In an ingenious analysis of the Chinese character niao, meaning ‘bird,’ Xu traces its genealogy from the present-day definition back to its original pictographic expression.  At the base of the work, the dictionary definition of niao lies like words on a page in a the "simplified" characters popularized during the Mao era.  But soon the words take flight, rising like a flock of exotic birds from a linguistic lake.  The flock of niao characters slowly migrates in a devolutionary process toward their origins in ancient Chinese seal script.  At the furthest end of the installation, and in a conceptual space far removed from the present, the acrylic characters are both bird and pictographic symbol – until the object described breaks free from the cage of linguistic representation and becomes simply an image of itself.

If Xu’s semiotic interest follows in the footsteps of equally rigorous Western conceptual artists like Joseph Kosuth, the domain of his engagement is primarily visual and delightfully experiential.  The space Xu opens for the contemplation of words and their meanings is a welcoming one of childlike enchantment with the mysteries of language and fascination with the visual forms for communication history has given us – or that the artist himself has invented.

While Xu’s ability to re-imagine traditional Chinese forms is itself an achievement – landscape painting no less than calligraphy, as his “Landscript” series which fuses the two attests (2005-06; Lot 149) – these forms are often perceived by foreign viewers as hermetically sealed from comprehension by unbridgeable distances.  That Xu has provided this bridge, perhaps for the first time in history, with the gemlike distillations of his poetic imagination entitles him to be ranked among the most original and significant artists of our time.  Such a distinction may ill fit a man of letters whose declared interest is an “art for the people,” but it is one he shares with another dedicated wordsmith whose concise wit similarly belies the profundity of her expression.  Her own meditations on the living word may therefore be the most appropriate tribute to the singular and transformative contributions of this extraordinary artist:

A word is dead
When it is said
       Some say.
I say it just
Begins to live
       That day.
          —Emily Dickinson (“A Word is Dead” (c. 1872), The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson, #1212.)