writing under sky

W r i t i n g ( U n d e r - ) S k y

On Xu Bing's «Tianshu»

... the designation ... "meaningless", especially insofar as this is conceptualized as positive or liberating ... is symptomatic of a desire to evade responsibility for meaning's total, & totalizing, reach; as if meaning was a husk that could be shucked off or a burden that could be bucked. Meaning is not a use value «as opposed to» some other kind of value, but more like valuation itself; & even to refuse value is a value & a sort of exchange. [1]
N O T E S

This essay was first published (in Italian) in «In Forma de Parole» 1999.1, pp. 143-153; and will also appear, in English, in Jerome Rothenberg and Stephen Clay eds. «A Book of the Book», New York: Granary Books, (forthcoming) 2000.

[1] Charles Bernstein, 'Artifice of Absorption,' in his «A Poetics», Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1992, p. 13. Bernstein's essay employs a number of the 'antiabsorptive' techniques which he discusses, including, as here, poetic lineation.

Xu Bing, who originally trained as a woodblock print-maker, is now recognized as a major international visual and installation artist. However, his work leads us to the body-and-soul problems of writing and language. Xu Bing's work is marked by a tenacious, love-hate engagement with what he calls «wenhua» and we call 'culture.' We might have been be tempted to say 'Chinese culture' here, or even 'traditional Chinese culture,' but this would be unnecessary, limiting and essentializing in the context of Xu Bing's work (which is already, demonstrably, translated to the West). Instead, all we need do is to read 'culture' or «wenhua» along with the particular Chinese connotations of the term. Etymologically, «wen» refers to 'pattern' especially those patterns which, as civilization emerged in East Asia, could be recognized and used as elements of writing. Characters in Chinese are «wenzi», or, in literary Chinese, often simply «wen».

This engagement with literary culture or culture-as-writing enables a properly poetic reading of Xu Bing's work. I began by quoting an essay by the American poet, Charles Bernstein, an essay which is, arguably, central to the understanding and reconfiguration of contemporary poetic practice. In this essay, Bernstein distinguishes -- «nonexclusively» -- between writing which is 'absorptive' and that which is 'antiabsorptive.' While all writing is artifice, the former employs artifice to absorb the reader's (self-)conscious attentions; the latter challenges such absorption, foregrounding itself and its techniques and resisting both reading and readability, whenever, that is, 'to read' is cast as to gaze through a transparent, permeable, 'absorptive' window, opening onto signification. To simplify his argument, Bernstein sets out a case for the valorization and value-creating potential of antiabsorptive writing, especially in literary cultures, like our own, which are dominated by -- gendered, politically and economically over-determined -- cults of absorptive readability. [2] [2] It should be recalled that the effectiveness of absorption and absorptive rhetoric is dependent on ideological as well as aesthetic agreements, which are hegemonic and politically implicated, both West & East.

What are the marks of antiabsorptive writing? These are significantly represented -- though by no means exclusively -- by the 'extralexical' cultural forms which are incorporated into writing-as-art, and especially poetry, as a function of artifice. Easily recognized examples include linebreaks and special typography, underlying sound and visual patterning: both traditional (e.g. verse forms, rhyme) and experimental (non-standard typography, acrostic patterning). Extralexical forms are those which express meanings which cannot be «paraphrased» -- from the language of the poem to the language of the reader -- as when, for example, a critic attempts to outline the underlying tenor or plot of a poem. In fact, «all» writing is embodied in and framed by extralexical forms. After all, even 'simple' graphic marks of ink on paper have an intrinsic extralexical aspect.

In his essay, Bernstein is at pains to argue that extralexical does not mean meaningless or even 'nonsemantic'. How could it be otherwise? This would be like claiming, for instance, that the fact that a poem is published in a book (rather than traced in the sand) is of no significance for the poem's meaning. At this point we turn back to the 'Book from the Sky.' From a certain perspective Xu Bing's work is the epitome of the impermeable, antiabsorptive poetic work, 'the radically impervious text' as Bernstein has it. The «Tianshu» was produced as a text aiming explicitly to subvert all lexical meaning. Over four years Xu Bing hand-carved a 'font' of approximately four thousand characters which were each intended to be unreadable, absent from any lexicon. While the graphic and compositional forms of his characters correspond precisely to the graphic and compositional principles of readable Chinese characters -- i.e. they look like they should be characters -- there is always some aspect of their spelling -- extra or missing strokes, unrecorded combinations of elements -- which locates the writing of the «Tianshu» outside all dictionaries. [3] [3] A number of commentators on the «Tianshu» have pointed out that there may be one or two characters in the work which do, in fact, appear in the most comprehensive dictionaries of Chinese characters -- as rare forms or «hapax legomena». This does not take anything away from the fact that the «Tianshu» characters were designed by their creator to be extralexical. These few characters may appear in dictionaries which Xu Bing failed to check, but they are not «identical» with those characters; they cannot be read as those characters. (Look at the context!)

However, this exemplary extralexical, unreadable text is embodied in forms which are eminently 'legible' as expressions of the «wen», the figurative 'letters' or inscribed 'patterns' of Chinese culture, all of which implicate aesthetics, though in various differing ways. In the carving of his font Xu Bing uses traditional materials, tools, and methods. As already mentioned, the graphic forms of strokes and compositional principles of character-formation are, in «visual» terms, strictly adhered to. Furthermore, these character forms are made in a consistent style, chosen to represent a particular moment in the history of Chinese type design. In the layout of the «Tianshu», as a book, Xu Bing employs entirely canonical forms. The book is printed by hand in a factory specializing in traditional printing and binding. [4] As a product of this craft, it is an example of high-quality Chinese book-making modelled on that of a specific period, the late Ming. It contains a wealth of traditional book design and typographic features, which are arranged in abstract design 'rhythms' throughout the work. The overall layout of the book is familiar; its parts and elements are recognizable as, for example, preface, table of contents, main text, commentaries, quotations, and so on. These parts collate and are internally consistent ('titles' in the contents page match titles in the body of the work). The sections of the book can be identified as to broad genre of writing -- expository prose with or without commentary, poetry, religious (sutra) writings, technical texts, glossaries, etc. [5] The binding of the book, in four stitch-bound paper-covered volumes encased in a walnut box, is all in accord with what is expected for an authoritative, encyclopaedic work, a extensive record from the archive of Chinese literature. In general, as an object, apart from its unreadable characters, the «Tianshu» is an icon of cultural authority; apart from its anti-lexicon, every other aspect of its material cultural signification is intact. [4] The only unusual aspect of the production of the «Tianshu» as a traditional Chinese book, is the fact that it is printed in wooden moveable type. Although moveable type was invented in China, in the 11th century, because of the huge scale of the fonts required, it was more economical -- until the advent of lithography -- to print books from carved blocks corresponding to western book openings (facing pages). Nonetheless there are many fine early example of printing from wooden moveable type. The aspect as of the «Tianshu» as a superb example of the -- very traditional -- art of the book in China has mostly been overlooked by commentators. More detailed description of the book 'as book'.

[5] The one formal feature which the «Tianshu» does not have, which might have been expected, is a language-like distribution of the four thousand characters throughout the texts of the work. I mean a non-lexical mapping of the character forms to classes of words (e.g. nouns & verbs vs. grammatical function words), so that, for example, some of the characters would appear much more frequently in the texts. This would also have produced a more Chinese text-like appearance to the pages of the «Tianshu» roughly corresponding to the sense of density or blackness of type which Western readers perceive when glancing at the page of a book.

By contrast, the impermeable aspects of the specific, contemporary -- mainly poetic -- texts which Bernstein addresses are, generally, functions of experimental or avant-garde practices. They are new, disruptive, anti-traditional, strikingly different from canonical forms. Moreover, the lexical or conventionally readable, content of these poems tends to be aligned with their radical formal gestures. Xu Bing's work, as concept and installation, is a standard-bearer for the renaissance of the Chinese avant-garde and, in his statements about «Tianshu», he claims that it is intended to expose the meaninglessness, the bankruptcy and boredom of traditional Chinese culture: to buck its tedious burden, or shuck it off like a husk, perhaps. [6] Paradoxically, when displayed in the West, his work reads as an exhibition of the traditional Chinese book: before the concept is explained to the non-Chinese reader, the aesthetic experience of the work involves an encounter with traditional Chinese literary culture, faithfully presented as the end result of many traditional practices. Apart from the self-consciously artistic arrangement of the «Tianshu»'s open volumes or the hanging of the Sutra galley sheets from the ceiling, how, for example, does a visit to the «Tianshu» installation differ from the experience of visiting display cases of fine Chinese editions in the galleries of the Oriental Collections of the British Library? [6] See, for example, Xu Bing's remarks in 'Non-Sense in Context: Xu Bing’s Art and Its Publics,' interview and translation by Janelle S. Taylor, «Public Culture» 5:2 (Winter 1993) p. 327: "One of the things I wanted to convey in [«Tianshu»] is that I feel that culture places too great a burden on people, it leaves people feeling exhausted." In conversation about the work with the present writer, he also spoke of traditional culture as 'boring' or 'without interest' («taoyan»; «mei yisi»).

This work generates paradoxes, which both complicate and resolve as we go on to place it in the context of its installation in the West, amongst readers who cannot read its unreadability «directly» -- if they do not know Chinese, if they do not know (without being told) that the words of the «Tianshu» are «not» Chinese. Transported to the West, the «Tianshu» suddenly appears, in a sense, to be maximally legible. Both non-Chinese and Chinese readers see an exhibition of traditional literary culture, in a form which, frankly, may be as familiar to certain western readers as to many of their Chinese counterparts, who are also raised on paperbacks and cheap modern codexes, printed by lithography. Both groups are equally unable to read any lexical content in the work; both are engaged with the same complexes of aesthetic experience. [7] Xu Bing says he wants to produce a 'tianshu,' a meaningless writing, an inscription of the meaninglessness of Chinese culture. [8] Paradoxically he produces a work which has transcultural resonance and translatability; a work which addresses radically different audiences with an experience which is somehow the same and «profoundly» the same, since it starkly reveals how the extralexical serves to create undeniable and absorbing meanings. [9] [7] "The equal or identical always moves toward the absence of difference, so that everything may be reduced to a common denominator. The same, by contrast, is the belonging together of what differs, through a gathering by way of difference." Martin Heidegger, '... Poetically man dwells ...,' in «Poetry, Language, Thought», trans. Albert Hofstadter, New York: Harper & Row, 1975, p. 218; quoted in Zhang Longxi, «The Tao and the Logos», Durham: Duke University Press, 1992, p. xv. See also Xu Bing's comments in Janelle, op. cit., p. 326: "These characters are fair, they treat all the people of the world equally. Americans can't read them, Chinese can't read them, I myself can't read them either. The ways in which people understand this artwork will vary according to their different cultural backgrounds, but I don't think that it really loses any of its meaning."

What would be the complement of the «Tianshu»? What would be a complement of this text which is minimally legible in lexical terms and seems to be maximally legible in its extralexical material culture? How might we conceive a writing which was maximally legible, lexically, and minimally engaged with the culture of the extralexical, with antiabsorptive artifice, in Bernstein's terms. Perhaps this 'counter-«Tianshu»' would be a dictionary inscribed in and through nature? Letters and words set amongst their 'natural definitions,' which would speak as simple presence? Apart from the insoluble problem of identifying or delineating any such 'natural definitions,' there would have to be a prior choice of lexicon for such a «Book of Earth». Would its letters and words be in English or Chinese, for example? This decision would require an extralexical, culturally determined judgement, which would imply lexical impermeability for one or other group of potential readers. However realized (as universal language-makers soon discover), such a 'natural lexicon' would be unreadable for some or require to be learned (not only its lexical items but also their categorical 'positions' on the problematically delineated landscape). Xu Bing's impermeable text reads across cultures with far greater facility, and necessarily so, for its excision of the lexical ironically indicates that the lexical and extralexical must always be coextensive in order for writing or reading to occur at all. If writing became transparent, absorbed into a supposed natural definition, it would either cease to exist or remain illegible to all but its writer or writers. It would certainly claim to abandon meaning -- where meaning is generated by patterns of inscription («wen») -- which is what Xu Bing's «Tianshu», in this written essay's final paradox, necessarily fails to do.

John Cayley
[8] Wu Hung in 'A "Ghost Rebellion": Notes on Xu Bing’s "Nonsense Writing" and Other Works,' «Public Culture» 6:2 (Winter 1994) pp. 411-418, has provided the most informed gloss -- by no means an exhaustive gloss in my view -- of «Tianshu» as 'nonsense writing,' a sense which it will bear without damage to the other meanings of the work, which are partially addressed here.

[9] See note 7, and "To speak of a radically impervious text / is to speak oxymoronically -- absorbency & repellency / are relative, contextual, & interpenetrating /terms, not new critical analytical categories. / The unreadable text is an outer limit for poetry; / in practical terms, the complete shutout / of the reader's attention is subverted / by most ostensibly antiabsorptive texts, partly /by some readers' "paradoxically" keen interest / in impermeability ... / The nonabsorbable text often turns / out to be eminently performable, [or 'installable' as visual art, in the case of the «Tianshu»] ... / Antiabsorptive does not necessarily mean nonentertaining -- / on the contrary." Bernstein, op. cit., p. 65.

S e l e c t e d P u b l i c a t i o n s
concerning Xu Bing's work and the «Tianshu» in particular

Abe, Stanley K. 'No-Sense from Out There: Xu Bing's «Tian Shu» in the West,' expanded version of a paper presented as part of the session 'The "Essential" Subject, or the Boundaries of Identity,' College Art Association Annual Meeting, Boston, Feb. 23, 1996.

Cayley, John. Description of the «Tianshu» for Han-Shan Tang Books of London.

Davidson, Christina. 'Words from Heaven: Xu Bing interviewed by Christina Davidson,' «Art and Asia Pacific» 1:2 (1994) pp. 48-55.

Erickson, Britta. 'Process and Meaning in the Art of Xu Bing,' in Panczenko, below.

Goodman, Jonathan. 'Bing Xu: 4,000 Characters in Search of a Meaning,' «Art News» (Sept. 1994) pp. 99-101.

Hamlish, Tamara. 'Prestidigitations: A Reply to Charles Stone,' «Public Culture» 6:2 (Winter 1994) pp. 419-423.

Hay, Jonathan. 'Ambivalent Icons: Works by Five Chinese Artists Based in the United States,' «Orientations» 23:7 (July 1992) pp. 37-43.

Keough, Jeffery (ed). «Xu Bing: Language Lost». Boston: Massachusetts College of Art, 1995.

Lung Men Art Gallery. «Xu Bing Banhua Zhan» (exhibition catalogue). Taipei: Lung Men Art Gallery, 1990.

Lloyd, Ann Wilson. 'Lost and Found,' in Keough, above.

Panczenko, Russell (curator). «Three Installations by Xu Bing». Madison: University of Wisconsin-Madison, 1991 (the catalogue notes, 'Process and Meaning in the Art of Xu Bing' are by Britta Erickson).

Reuter, Laurel. 'Into the Dark Sings the Nightingale: The Work of Xu Bing,' essay in catalogue notes to an exhibition. Grand Forks: North Dakota Museum of Art, 1992.

Stone, Charles. 'Xu Bing and the Printed Word,' «Public Culture» 6:2 (Winter 1994) pp. 407-410.

Taylor, Janelle S. 'Non-Sense in Context: Xu Bing's Art and Its Publics,' «Public Culture» 5:2 (Winter 1993) pp. 317-327.

Tokyo Gallery. «Xu Bing» (exhibition catalogue). Toyko: Tokyo Gallery, 1991.

Wang, Eugene Yuejin. 'Of Text and Texture: The Cultural Relevance of Xu Bing's Art,' in Keough, above.

Wu Hung. 'A "Ghost Rebellion": Notes on Xu Bing's "Nonsense Writing" and Other Works,' «Public Culture» 6:2 (Winter 1994) pp. 411-418.

Yang Lian and John Cayley. 'Three Words and Non-Words on the Art of Xu Bing: A Dialogue between Yang Lian and John Cayley,' for the catalogue to an exhibition of Xu Bing's one-person show at the Miro Foundation, Majorca, 1997/98.

W r i t i n g ( U n d e r - ) S k y On Xu Bing's «Tianshu»
... the designation ... "meaningless", especially insofar as this is conceptualized as positive or liberating ... is symptomatic of a desire to evade responsibility for meaning's total, & totalizing, reach; as if meaning was a husk that could be shucked off or a burden that could be bucked. Meaning is not a use value «as opposed to» some other kind of value, but more like valuation itself; & even to refuse value is a value & a sort of exchange. [1]	N O T E S This essay was first published (in Italian) in «In Forma de Parole» 1999.1, pp. 143-153; and will also appear, in English, in Jerome Rothenberg and Stephen Clay eds. «A Book of the Book», New York: Granary Books, (forthcoming) 2000. [1] Charles Bernstein, 'Artifice of Absorption,' in his «A Poetics», Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1992, p. 13. Bernstein's essay employs a number of the 'antiabsorptive' techniques which he discusses, including, as here, poetic lineation.
Xu Bing, who originally trained as a woodblock print-maker, is now recognized as a major international visual and installation artist. However, his work leads us to the body-and-soul problems of writing and language. Xu Bing's work is marked by a tenacious, love-hate engagement with what he calls «wenhua» and we call 'culture.' We might have been be tempted to say 'Chinese culture' here, or even 'traditional Chinese culture,' but this would be unnecessary, limiting and essentializing in the context of Xu Bing's work (which is already, demonstrably, translated to the West). Instead, all we need do is to read 'culture' or «wenhua» along with the particular Chinese connotations of the term. Etymologically, «wen» refers to 'pattern' especially those patterns which, as civilization emerged in East Asia, could be recognized and used as elements of writing. Characters in Chinese are «wenzi», or, in literary Chinese, often simply «wen». This engagement with literary culture or culture-as-writing enables a properly poetic reading of Xu Bing's work. I began by quoting an essay by the American poet, Charles Bernstein, an essay which is, arguably, central to the understanding and reconfiguration of contemporary poetic practice. In this essay, Bernstein distinguishes -- «nonexclusively» -- between writing which is 'absorptive' and that which is 'antiabsorptive.' While all writing is artifice, the former employs artifice to absorb the reader's (self-)conscious attentions; the latter challenges such absorption, foregrounding itself and its techniques and resisting both reading and readability, whenever, that is, 'to read' is cast as to gaze through a transparent, permeable, 'absorptive' window, opening onto signification. To simplify his argument, Bernstein sets out a case for the valorization and value-creating potential of antiabsorptive writing, especially in literary cultures, like our own, which are dominated by -- gendered, politically and economically over-determined -- cults of absorptive readability. [2]	[2] It should be recalled that the effectiveness of absorption and absorptive rhetoric is dependent on ideological as well as aesthetic agreements, which are hegemonic and politically implicated, both West & East.
What are the marks of antiabsorptive writing? These are significantly represented -- though by no means exclusively -- by the 'extralexical' cultural forms which are incorporated into writing-as-art, and especially poetry, as a function of artifice. Easily recognized examples include linebreaks and special typography, underlying sound and visual patterning: both traditional (e.g. verse forms, rhyme) and experimental (non-standard typography, acrostic patterning). Extralexical forms are those which express meanings which cannot be «paraphrased» -- from the language of the poem to the language of the reader -- as when, for example, a critic attempts to outline the underlying tenor or plot of a poem. In fact, «all» writing is embodied in and framed by extralexical forms. After all, even 'simple' graphic marks of ink on paper have an intrinsic extralexical aspect. In his essay, Bernstein is at pains to argue that extralexical does not mean meaningless or even 'nonsemantic'. How could it be otherwise? This would be like claiming, for instance, that the fact that a poem is published in a book (rather than traced in the sand) is of no significance for the poem's meaning. At this point we turn back to the 'Book from the Sky.' From a certain perspective Xu Bing's work is the epitome of the impermeable, antiabsorptive poetic work, 'the radically impervious text' as Bernstein has it. The «Tianshu» was produced as a text aiming explicitly to subvert all lexical meaning. Over four years Xu Bing hand-carved a 'font' of approximately four thousand characters which were each intended to be unreadable, absent from any lexicon. While the graphic and compositional forms of his characters correspond precisely to the graphic and compositional principles of readable Chinese characters -- i.e. they look like they should be characters -- there is always some aspect of their spelling -- extra or missing strokes, unrecorded combinations of elements -- which locates the writing of the «Tianshu» outside all dictionaries. [3]	[3] A number of commentators on the «Tianshu» have pointed out that there may be one or two characters in the work which do, in fact, appear in the most comprehensive dictionaries of Chinese characters -- as rare forms or «hapax legomena». This does not take anything away from the fact that the «Tianshu» characters were designed by their creator to be extralexical. These few characters may appear in dictionaries which Xu Bing failed to check, but they are not «identical» with those characters; they cannot be read as those characters. (Look at the context!)
However, this exemplary extralexical, unreadable text is embodied in forms which are eminently 'legible' as expressions of the «wen», the figurative 'letters' or inscribed 'patterns' of Chinese culture, all of which implicate aesthetics, though in various differing ways. In the carving of his font Xu Bing uses traditional materials, tools, and methods. As already mentioned, the graphic forms of strokes and compositional principles of character-formation are, in «visual» terms, strictly adhered to. Furthermore, these character forms are made in a consistent style, chosen to represent a particular moment in the history of Chinese type design. In the layout of the «Tianshu», as a book, Xu Bing employs entirely canonical forms. The book is printed by hand in a factory specializing in traditional printing and binding. [4] As a product of this craft, it is an example of high-quality Chinese book-making modelled on that of a specific period, the late Ming. It contains a wealth of traditional book design and typographic features, which are arranged in abstract design 'rhythms' throughout the work. The overall layout of the book is familiar; its parts and elements are recognizable as, for example, preface, table of contents, main text, commentaries, quotations, and so on. These parts collate and are internally consistent ('titles' in the contents page match titles in the body of the work). The sections of the book can be identified as to broad genre of writing -- expository prose with or without commentary, poetry, religious (sutra) writings, technical texts, glossaries, etc. [5] The binding of the book, in four stitch-bound paper-covered volumes encased in a walnut box, is all in accord with what is expected for an authoritative, encyclopaedic work, a extensive record from the archive of Chinese literature. In general, as an object, apart from its unreadable characters, the «Tianshu» is an icon of cultural authority; apart from its anti-lexicon, every other aspect of its material cultural signification is intact.	[4] The only unusual aspect of the production of the «Tianshu» as a traditional Chinese book, is the fact that it is printed in wooden moveable type. Although moveable type was invented in China, in the 11th century, because of the huge scale of the fonts required, it was more economical -- until the advent of lithography -- to print books from carved blocks corresponding to western book openings (facing pages). Nonetheless there are many fine early example of printing from wooden moveable type. The aspect as of the «Tianshu» as a superb example of the -- very traditional -- art of the book in China has mostly been overlooked by commentators. More detailed description of the book 'as book'. [5] The one formal feature which the «Tianshu» does not have, which might have been expected, is a language-like distribution of the four thousand characters throughout the texts of the work. I mean a non-lexical mapping of the character forms to classes of words (e.g. nouns & verbs vs. grammatical function words), so that, for example, some of the characters would appear much more frequently in the texts. This would also have produced a more Chinese text-like appearance to the pages of the «Tianshu» roughly corresponding to the sense of density or blackness of type which Western readers perceive when glancing at the page of a book.
By contrast, the impermeable aspects of the specific, contemporary -- mainly poetic -- texts which Bernstein addresses are, generally, functions of experimental or avant-garde practices. They are new, disruptive, anti-traditional, strikingly different from canonical forms. Moreover, the lexical or conventionally readable, content of these poems tends to be aligned with their radical formal gestures. Xu Bing's work, as concept and installation, is a standard-bearer for the renaissance of the Chinese avant-garde and, in his statements about «Tianshu», he claims that it is intended to expose the meaninglessness, the bankruptcy and boredom of traditional Chinese culture: to buck its tedious burden, or shuck it off like a husk, perhaps. [6] Paradoxically, when displayed in the West, his work reads as an exhibition of the traditional Chinese book: before the concept is explained to the non-Chinese reader, the aesthetic experience of the work involves an encounter with traditional Chinese literary culture, faithfully presented as the end result of many traditional practices. Apart from the self-consciously artistic arrangement of the «Tianshu»'s open volumes or the hanging of the Sutra galley sheets from the ceiling, how, for example, does a visit to the «Tianshu» installation differ from the experience of visiting display cases of fine Chinese editions in the galleries of the Oriental Collections of the British Library?	[6] See, for example, Xu Bing's remarks in 'Non-Sense in Context: Xu Bing’s Art and Its Publics,' interview and translation by Janelle S. Taylor, «Public Culture» 5:2 (Winter 1993) p. 327: "One of the things I wanted to convey in [«Tianshu»] is that I feel that culture places too great a burden on people, it leaves people feeling exhausted." In conversation about the work with the present writer, he also spoke of traditional culture as 'boring' or 'without interest' («taoyan»; «mei yisi»).
This work generates paradoxes, which both complicate and resolve as we go on to place it in the context of its installation in the West, amongst readers who cannot read its unreadability «directly» -- if they do not know Chinese, if they do not know (without being told) that the words of the «Tianshu» are «not» Chinese. Transported to the West, the «Tianshu» suddenly appears, in a sense, to be maximally legible. Both non-Chinese and Chinese readers see an exhibition of traditional literary culture, in a form which, frankly, may be as familiar to certain western readers as to many of their Chinese counterparts, who are also raised on paperbacks and cheap modern codexes, printed by lithography. Both groups are equally unable to read any lexical content in the work; both are engaged with the same complexes of aesthetic experience. [7] Xu Bing says he wants to produce a 'tianshu,' a meaningless writing, an inscription of the meaninglessness of Chinese culture. [8] Paradoxically he produces a work which has transcultural resonance and translatability; a work which addresses radically different audiences with an experience which is somehow the same and «profoundly» the same, since it starkly reveals how the extralexical serves to create undeniable and absorbing meanings. [9]	[7] "The equal or identical always moves toward the absence of difference, so that everything may be reduced to a common denominator. The same, by contrast, is the belonging together of what differs, through a gathering by way of difference." Martin Heidegger, '... Poetically man dwells ...,' in «Poetry, Language, Thought», trans. Albert Hofstadter, New York: Harper & Row, 1975, p. 218; quoted in Zhang Longxi, «The Tao and the Logos», Durham: Duke University Press, 1992, p. xv. See also Xu Bing's comments in Janelle, op. cit., p. 326: "These characters are fair, they treat all the people of the world equally. Americans can't read them, Chinese can't read them, I myself can't read them either. The ways in which people understand this artwork will vary according to their different cultural backgrounds, but I don't think that it really loses any of its meaning."
What would be the complement of the «Tianshu»? What would be a complement of this text which is minimally legible in lexical terms and seems to be maximally legible in its extralexical material culture? How might we conceive a writing which was maximally legible, lexically, and minimally engaged with the culture of the extralexical, with antiabsorptive artifice, in Bernstein's terms. Perhaps this 'counter-«Tianshu»' would be a dictionary inscribed in and through nature? Letters and words set amongst their 'natural definitions,' which would speak as simple presence? Apart from the insoluble problem of identifying or delineating any such 'natural definitions,' there would have to be a prior choice of lexicon for such a «Book of Earth». Would its letters and words be in English or Chinese, for example? This decision would require an extralexical, culturally determined judgement, which would imply lexical impermeability for one or other group of potential readers. However realized (as universal language-makers soon discover), such a 'natural lexicon' would be unreadable for some or require to be learned (not only its lexical items but also their categorical 'positions' on the problematically delineated landscape). Xu Bing's impermeable text reads across cultures with far greater facility, and necessarily so, for its excision of the lexical ironically indicates that the lexical and extralexical must always be coextensive in order for writing or reading to occur at all. If writing became transparent, absorbed into a supposed natural definition, it would either cease to exist or remain illegible to all but its writer or writers. It would certainly claim to abandon meaning -- where meaning is generated by patterns of inscription («wen») -- which is what Xu Bing's «Tianshu», in this written essay's final paradox, necessarily fails to do. John Cayley	[8] Wu Hung in 'A "Ghost Rebellion": Notes on Xu Bing’s "Nonsense Writing" and Other Works,' «Public Culture» 6:2 (Winter 1994) pp. 411-418, has provided the most informed gloss -- by no means an exhaustive gloss in my view -- of «Tianshu» as 'nonsense writing,' a sense which it will bear without damage to the other meanings of the work, which are partially addressed here. [9] See note 7, and "To speak of a radically impervious text / is to speak oxymoronically -- absorbency & repellency / are relative, contextual, & interpenetrating /terms, not new critical analytical categories. / The unreadable text is an outer limit for poetry; / in practical terms, the complete shutout / of the reader's attention is subverted / by most ostensibly antiabsorptive texts, partly /by some readers' "paradoxically" keen interest / in impermeability ... / The nonabsorbable text often turns / out to be eminently performable, [or 'installable' as visual art, in the case of the «Tianshu»] ... / Antiabsorptive does not necessarily mean nonentertaining -- / on the contrary." Bernstein, op. cit., p. 65.
S e l e c t e d P u b l i c a t i o n s concerning Xu Bing's work and the «Tianshu» in particular Abe, Stanley K. 'No-Sense from Out There: Xu Bing's «Tian Shu» in the West,' expanded version of a paper presented as part of the session 'The "Essential" Subject, or the Boundaries of Identity,' College Art Association Annual Meeting, Boston, Feb. 23, 1996. Cayley, John. Description of the «Tianshu» for Han-Shan Tang Books of London. Davidson, Christina. 'Words from Heaven: Xu Bing interviewed by Christina Davidson,' «Art and Asia Pacific» 1:2 (1994) pp. 48-55. Erickson, Britta. 'Process and Meaning in the Art of Xu Bing,' in Panczenko, below. Goodman, Jonathan. 'Bing Xu: 4,000 Characters in Search of a Meaning,' «Art News» (Sept. 1994) pp. 99-101. Hamlish, Tamara. 'Prestidigitations: A Reply to Charles Stone,' «Public Culture» 6:2 (Winter 1994) pp. 419-423. Hay, Jonathan. 'Ambivalent Icons: Works by Five Chinese Artists Based in the United States,' «Orientations» 23:7 (July 1992) pp. 37-43. Keough, Jeffery (ed). «Xu Bing: Language Lost». Boston: Massachusetts College of Art, 1995. Lung Men Art Gallery. «Xu Bing Banhua Zhan» (exhibition catalogue). Taipei: Lung Men Art Gallery, 1990. Lloyd, Ann Wilson. 'Lost and Found,' in Keough, above. Panczenko, Russell (curator). «Three Installations by Xu Bing». Madison: University of Wisconsin-Madison, 1991 (the catalogue notes, 'Process and Meaning in the Art of Xu Bing' are by Britta Erickson). Reuter, Laurel. 'Into the Dark Sings the Nightingale: The Work of Xu Bing,' essay in catalogue notes to an exhibition. Grand Forks: North Dakota Museum of Art, 1992. Stone, Charles. 'Xu Bing and the Printed Word,' «Public Culture» 6:2 (Winter 1994) pp. 407-410. Taylor, Janelle S. 'Non-Sense in Context: Xu Bing's Art and Its Publics,' «Public Culture» 5:2 (Winter 1993) pp. 317-327. Tokyo Gallery. «Xu Bing» (exhibition catalogue). Toyko: Tokyo Gallery, 1991. Wang, Eugene Yuejin. 'Of Text and Texture: The Cultural Relevance of Xu Bing's Art,' in Keough, above. Wu Hung. 'A "Ghost Rebellion": Notes on Xu Bing's "Nonsense Writing" and Other Works,' «Public Culture» 6:2 (Winter 1994) pp. 411-418. Yang Lian and John Cayley. 'Three Words and Non-Words on the Art of Xu Bing: A Dialogue between Yang Lian and John Cayley,' for the catalogue to an exhibition of Xu Bing's one-person show at the Miro Foundation, Majorca, 1997/98.