For Square Word Calligraphy, Xu Bing designs a calligraphic system by which English words come to resemble Chinese characters. Like a linguistic breeder, the artist combines Chinese calligraphic arts with English writing to create a new “species.” Yet it’s different from the nonsense characters in Book from the Sky, which bring the viewer feelings of hesitation, suspicion, and confusion. When reading Square Word Calligraphy, those feelings are suddenly resolved with the revelation that the work contains “real” text. The West thereby gains a new, Eastern form of calligraphic culture. Established notions of Chinese and English no longer obtain, and one’s thinking is reset, opening new potentials that limn the foundations of cognition itself.

After developing this lettering system, Xu Bing created a new installation piece, modeled on adult literacy classes, to serve as an exhibition space, adding a textbook, instructional video, and calligraphy tracing book for use in the classroom. As the audience enters the gallery, they also enter a site of study. 

1994

Location: Beijing, China

Materials: Performance media installation with live animal / Live Pig, books, mannequin, wood blocks, ink.

This work was created as an extension of an earlier project: A Case Study of Transference. A life-sized mannequin in human form, covered in false-character tattoos, was placed inside an enclosure containing a male pig, similarly tattooed. The intention was both to observe the reaction of the pig towards the mannequin and to produce an absurd and random drama -- an intention that was realized when the pig reacted to the mannequin in an aggressively sexual manner. The entire process was documented and the resulting photographs were exhibited several years after the event, in 1998. 

1994

Location： Beijing, China

Materials: Performance, mixed media installation / Live parrot 

For this performance art work Xu Bing trained a parrot to communicate certain sentiments to gallery audiences. For the duration of the exhibition, the parrot sat alone in its cage in the exhibition hall and quoted learned phrases, such as:

You people are so boring!

Modern art is crap!

Why are you holding me prisoner, you bastards!

1994

Materials: Mixed media installation; live silkworms and books

Every summer since 1994, Xu Bing has undertaken a project in the United States involving the raising of live silkworms. Together, these projects constitute a single, ongoing series. In Silkworm Books, silkworm moths lay their small black eggs on the blank pages of open books. The thousands of black egg-markings create a "printed text" evoking the strange script of some mysterious, secret language. At the opening of the installation, the eggs are already very close to hatching. In the days following, as the eggs hatch the text is altered and dissipated as the black dots gradually disappear and transform into thousands of squiggling black lines (the young silkworms) that proceed to crawl out from between the pages of the books, startling the viewer confronted with these strange volumes.