2015

Medium: Clothing label and programming writing

Dimensions of each item: 35.7 x 26.3 x 12 cm

Dimensions of packaging: 41 × 28.5 × 3.5 cm

Exhibition: Museum of Art Pudong, Shanghai, 2021-2022. TOKYO Gallery + BTAP, Beijing, 2021

Starting from 2015, Xu Bing has amassed an extensive collection of clothing brand labels from numerous private enterprises. When brought together, these labels reflect the history of their entrepreneurship, development, bottlenecks, transformations, and acquisitions. Furthermore, we can perceive the brand names as carriers of people’s hopes and aspirations for the future. For this project, a “poem writing software” has been developed. The computer program searches for appropriate words and sentences among fashion label tags to create a Seven-Character Poem which is later compiled into the collection. This process also symbolizes an advancement in the creation of an “artist book.”

2021-2022

Media: Mixed media

Dimensions: 145 x 100 x 2.4 x 8 cm

Exhibition: Mirroring the Heart of Heaven and Earth—Ideals and Images in the Chinese Study, The Palace Museum Meridian Gate (Wu men)，Beijing

Since 2004, Xu Bing has sought to create a book comprehensible to all human beings using solely public signs. Although it has been more than a decade since the start of this project, it is ever evolving. With the growing globalization of “graphic expression” brought by digital computation, new forms of expressions such as emojis and memes have emerged, particularly popular among young generations. These contemporary signs, seemingly disconnected from ancient traditions, now find their place in the main exhibition hall of the Palace Museum. While the audience may initially struggle to adjust to the translation of  “兰亭集序” in emojis and memes, the resulting sense of alienation produced is essential to this work’s intention—to supply traditional modes of thinking with new “elements”. Through this approach, one may gain a better understanding of both traditional and contemporary cultures.

In contemporary language, “Wujing Cuishi” (“a room assembling five classics”) would mean “library”. Ancient Chinese culture adeptly employed images to convey complex ideas, demonstrating that looking at images is akin to reading texts. “Shu Hua Tong Yuan” (“writing and drawing bear the same root”) is less of a commentary on style, but rather a reflection of semiotics. The way in which the Chinese character “shan” (“mountain”) is written is comparable to the way in which one would draw a mountain. Despite the evolution of signification techniques, hieroglyphs, and coreference in modern Chinese, the hieroglyphic constituents still form the genetic core of the language. For instance, when one reads the word “门” (“door”), one sees the image of a door. If one were to bolt the door, adding a rod/stroke on it, then one arrives at “闩” (“latch”). Even when one writes the character “囧” (“undesirable distress”), it resembles the creation of an emoji.

Winessing the continuity of communication through pictures and images, especially in the context of the cyberpunk and space age, is truly captivating. It evokes a sense of time travel, residing in this juncture and perceiving life’s expansion across time and space. To describe this as merely entering the age of images is somewhat inaccurate, as humanity has been immersed in this mode of communication for thousands of years. Today, our daily lives are deeply intertwined with the use of cell phones, which serve as our portable libraries and museums. As soon as we turn them on, our first instinct is to read the signs they present to us. 

Xu Bing’s profound sensitivity to signs stems from the genetic ability of reading images ingrained within us. It is deeply rooted in humanity’s tradition, and its fullest potential is realized when it is activated.

Related Link：https://mp.weixin.qq.com/s__biz=MjM5Njg5ODA4OA==&mid=2247485023&idx=1&sn=25c1441184afa62a0ed683cf264418aa&chksm=a6e372189194fb0e2ff59b461516abdbc915276df0ce2bd8ff3159ec30eb24b74721f64a3a6e#rd

2000

Medium: Custom-cut "American Spirit" brand cigarattes, Chinese texts from Daodejing and Chairman Mao's words handwritten in ink, encased in hinged wooden box

Size: Case (closed): 3 1/2 x 3 7/8 in

Exhibition: The Tobacco Project: A Series of Installations Created by Xu Bing, The Duke Homestead &  Tobacco Museum, and The Perkins Library Gallery, Duke University, Durham, North Carolina, USA, 2000

                  Xu Bing Tobacco Project: Shanghai, Shanghai Gallery of Art, Shanghai, China, 2004

                  Tobacco Project 3, Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Richmond, Virginia, USA, 2011

2000

Medium: Cardboard matches, printed with Robert Frost’s “Fire and Ice” (1920)

Size: Each: 1 5/8 x 1 3/4 in.

Exhibition: The Tobacco Project: A Series of Installations Created by Xu Bing, The Duke Homestead &  Tobacco Museum, and The Perkins Library Gallery, Duke University, Durham, North Carolina，USA, 2000

                  Xu Bing Tobacco Project: Shanghai, Shanghai Gallery of Art, Shanghai, China, 2004

                  Tobacco Project 3, Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Richmond, Virginia, USA, 2011

2000

Medium: Neon, stage smoke

Size: Variable

Exhibition: The Tobacco Project: A Series of Installations Created by Xu Bing, The Duke Homestead & Tobacco Museum, and The Perkins Library Gallery, Duke University, Durham, North Carolina, USA, 2000

2000

Medium: “American Spirit" brand cigarette package seals, typed with text from Lao Zi, The Book of Tao, translated by Gu Zhengkun (1995)

Size: 23 1/4 x 1 in

Exhibition: The Tobacco Project: A Series of Installations Created by Xu Bing, The Duke Homestead & Tobacco Museum, and The Perkins Library Gallery, Duke University, Durham, North Carolina, USA, 2000

                  Xu Bing Tobacco Project: Shanghai, Shanghai Gallery of Art, Shanghai, China, 2004

2020 

Materials: Book, silkworm

Dimensions: 1.5 (H) x 52 (L) x 42 (W) cm

Exhibition Location: Asia Society Triennial, New York, U.S.A.

2008

Materials: Carved Stone

Dimensions: Varies

Location: Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden, Germany

The Forest Project is an experiment of creating a self-sustaining system that will move funds from wealthy areas to impoverished areas for planting trees. Its feasibility is based on the following principles: firstly, leveraging free online services such as auction and sales hosting, money transfers, and even online teaching to minimize costs; secondly, ensuring benefits for all participants in the project; thirdly, leveraging regional economic discrepancies (for example, the cost of a subway ride in New York, which is $2.50, can plant ten trees in Kenya). 

2003—ongoing

Xu Bing’s Book from the Ground, which he has been working on since 2003, is an ongoing exploration of communication and language. The project involves compiling symbols and pictograms from the public sphere and using them to create a book exclusively written in visual language. 

The uniqueness of Book from the Ground lies in its accessibility to any reader belonging to contemporary society. Regardless of one’s cultural or linguistic background, the book’s material can be interpreted and understood due to the universal nature of its visual symbols. This eliminates the need for translation and can be published anywhere.

For the Book fom the Ground installation, Xu Bing recreates the working environment of his studio. By bringing select materials from his studio, he symbolically suggests the continuous nature of the project as a never-ending exploration of visual communication. 

Furthermore, Xu Bing Studio also created a character database software that corresponds to the language of the book. Users can enter words either in English or in Chinese, and subsequently, the program will translate them into Xu Bing's lexicon of signs. It thus serves as an intermediary form of communication and exchange between the two languages. As personal computers and the internet become increasingly integrated into daily life, the lexicon of digital icons grows accordingly, and the symbolic language of Book from the Ground has been further updated, augmented, and complexified. In response to his own Book from the Sky (1988) whose language is completely illegible, Book from the Ground is contrastingly legible to all. It may be considered an expression of Xu Bing’s long-standing vision of a universal language.

2001

Materials: Cut and painted acrylic

Location: Arthur M. Sackler Gallery, Smithsonian Institution, Washington D.C., U.S.A.

The work is mainly comprised of over 400 calligraphic variants of the Chinese character “niao”, meaning bird, carved in colored acrylic and laid out in a shimmering track that rises from the floor into the air. On the gallery floor Chinese characters in the “simplified style” script popularized during the Mao era are used to write out the dictionary definition for niao. The bird/niao characters then break away from the confines of the literal definition and take flight through the installation space. As they rise into the air, the characters “de-evolve” from the simplified system to standardized Chinese text and finally to the ancient Chinese pictograph hasde upon a bird’s actual appearance. At the uppermost point of the installation, a flock of these ancient characters, in form of both bird and word, soar high into the rafters toward the upper windows of the space, as though attempting to break free of the words with which humans attempt to categorize and define them.

The colorful, shimmering imagery of the installation imparts a magical, fairy-tale like quality. Yet the overt simplicity, charm and ready comprehensibility of the work has the underlying effect of guiding the audience to open up the “cognitive space” of their minds to the implications of, and relationships between, word, concept, symbol and image.

1987－1991

Medium: Mixed media installation/ hand-printed books and scrolls printed from blocks inscribed with ''false'' characters

Produced over the course of four years, this four-volume treatise features thousands of meaningless characters resembling Chinese. Each character was meticulously designed by the artist in a Song-style font that was standardized by artisans in the Ming dynasty. In this immersive installation, the artist hand-carved over four thousand moveable type printing blocks. The painstaking production process and the format of the work, arrayed like ancient Chinese classics, were such that the audience could not believe that these exquisite texts were completely illegible. The work simultaneously entices and denies the viewer’s desire to read the work.

As Xu Bing has noted, the false characters “seem to upset intellectuals,” provoking doubt in established systems of knowledge. Many early viewers would spend considerable time scrutinizing the texts, fixedly searching for genuine characters amidst the illegible ones.

Xu Bing has designed a calligraphic system known as Square Word Calligraphy in which English words come to resemble Chinese characters. Like a linguistic breeder, the artist combines Chinese calligraphy with English writing to create a new “species”. However, it is different from the nonsensical characters in Book from the Sky which breed feelings of suspicion and confusion in the viewer. Upon reading Square Word Calligraphy, these conflicts are resolved with the immediate revelation that the work contains “real” text. Through this praocess, Xu Bing has introduced a novel Eastern art form into the Western cultural sphere. It transcends established notions of Chinese and English, reshaping perceptual norms and challenging the very foundation of cognition.

After developing this lettering system, Xu Bing created a new installation piece modeled on adult literacy classes within the exhibition space. He also added a textbook, an instructional video, and a practice sheet just like those used in classroom settings. When the audience goes into the gallery, it is as if he or she enters a study space.

1994－1996

Materials: Mixed-media installation; instructional video, model books, copybooks, ink, brushes, brush stands, blackboard

The intention of this installation is to simulate a classroom-like setting modeled on adult literacy classes, within a gallery or museum space. Desks are supplied with small containers of ink, brushes, and a copybook with instructions on the basic principles of 'New English Calligraphy, a writing system invented and designed by the artist. A video, Elementary Square Word Calligraphy Instruction, is played on a monitor in the exhibition space, capturing the audience’s attention and inviting them to participate in the class. Once seated at the desks, the audience is instructed to seize their brushes and the lesson in New English Calligraphy begins. 

Essentially, New English Calligraphy is a fusion of written English and written Chinese. The letters of an English word are slightly altered and arranged in a square word format so that the word takes on the ostensible form of a Chinese character, yet remains legible to the English reader. As participants attempt to recognize and read the words,their ingrained thinking patterns are challenged. Accordingly, the artist strongly believes in the significance of disrupting habitual thinking. While undergoing this process of estrangement and re-familiarization with one's written language, the audience is reminded that the sensation of distance between other systems of language and one's own is largely self-induced.

2012: 17'

2012, 2015: 15'

Materials: seventeen-minute animated film 

This animation is conceived as a study and imagination of a calligraphy masterpiece by Zhao Mengfu (1254-1322) in the collection of Yahoo’s founder, Mr. Zhiyuan Yang. Through the medium of widescreen animation, The Character of Characters describes the source of the unique character of Chinese people. Everyone in China who has received basic education must, over the course of years, commit to memorize and then write and re-write thousands of characters, each character a drawing. This is the way things have been done over thousands of years in the Chinese history, so this must have had some influence on the formation of the character of Chinese people. It implies the way that Chinese people see and approach things, and why China is the way it is today – developing at this breakneck speed but not in line with the Western value system.

Chinese people’s worldviews and concepts of freedom; the consequences of Chinese people’s flexibility, collectivism, face-saving mentality, moral stance that demands focus on communal interests, and worship of symbols and big names; the ability of Chinese culture to digest other cultures, and the Chinese culture of copying (“shanzhai”). All of these special characteristics could be said to have a deep connection to the Chinese way of writing characters. This animation seeks to reveal the relation between Chinese writing and cultural characteristics, the core and energy of Chinese culture, and its advantages and disadvantages for people to continue to build new modes of human civilization.

 Supported by The Robert H. N. Ho Family Foundation.

2010

Materials: Woodblock print mounted as a handscroll, ink on paper

"I created this work upon an invitation from Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. By cutting, reorganizing, and printing motifs from the Mustard Seed Garden Manual of Painting (1679), I created a handscroll version of the classic manual. I believe that a core characteristic of Chinese painting is its schematized nature, which is reflected in classic literature, theatrical expression, and various methods of social production. The Mustard Seed Garden Manual of Painting is a dictionary of signs for representing the myriad things of the world. Through The Mustard Seed Garden Landscape Scroll, I attempt to investigate and reveal the relation between the Chinese way of thinking and the semiotic and schematized nature of Chinese culture."

                   -- Xu Bing, 2010

Landscript, as the title suggests, is “pictures” that Xu Bing intentionally made with “script.”  This project started when the artist went to the Himalayas in Nepal in 1999 and sketched “scenes” with Chinese characters. China has had a longstanding tradition that emphasizes the interconnectedness of calligraphy and painting, considering them to have shared origins. Xu Bing’s Landscript, a landscape-in-script artwork, transforms visual images of landscapes into linguistic forms. Through this, viewers are prompted to reassess the distinctiveness of Chinese culture hidden within traditional landscape paintings and offers a unique approach to “reading a scene."

1999

Materials: Mixed media installation; 

Dimension: 36 x 9 ft (1097.3 x 273.4 cm)

Location: Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1999; Victoria and Albert Musum, London, 2001

Commissioned by the Museum of Modern Art in New York, this work was created for the Museum's ''Project Series,'' a group of monumental banners designed by international artists to be displayed outside the entrance to the museum. Xu emblazoned his eye-catching red-and-yellow banner, measuring 36ft x 9ft, with the slogan ''ART FOR THE PEOPLE: Chairman Mao said'' inscribed in his own invented system of ''Square Word Calligraphy'' -- English words deconstructed but then re-configured into forms that mimic the square structure of Chinese characters. With its prominent display above the museum entrance, the banner and its slogan served both as a motto for the museum and as a public airing of one of Mao Zedong's most fundamental views on art. Reflective also of the artist's personal conviction that Mao's concept of art for the people is universally relevant; the work exemplifies the way in which Xu integrates his particular cultural background and life experience into the international context of contemporary art. 

Medium: mixed media installation/ cast aluminum

...The towering new creation that cascades from the top of the Elvehjem's Paige Court is a celebration rather than a memorial. "The Glassy Surface of a Lake" (formerly titled "Net") is inspired by a passage in Henry David Thoreau's "Walden," a meditation on the profound purity of an utterly still lake. In the passage, the famous naturalist writer inverts his viewpoint to envision the lake hovering overhead so "you could walk right under it to the opposite hills."
Xu has re-created that vision in the museum: the suspended lake takes the form of the very letters of Thoreau's passage. Thousands of wire-linked aluminum letters hover at the top of the three-story museum court and, in the middle of the "lake," letters tumble down to the first floor. As we gaze up this shaft of metaphorical liquid, what are we meant to see?
In his fresh perspective on the lake, Thoreau envisions the lake as no less than "Earth's eye; looking into which the beholder measures the depth of his own nature." Do we see ourselves mirrored in those watery depths? Can each of us measure our nature in this mirror of nature?
For sure, mirroring definitions of the same word ("nature") reflect the play of words and life - and the urgent need to protect both from poisoning rhetoric. If the thousands of wired-together letters lack the elegance of a still lake, Xu, the Elvehjem staff (and UW-Madison students) have nevertheless produced a marvelous confabulation.

-- Kevin Lynch, ''Xu Bing and The Power of Words.'' The Capital Times, 10 Sept, 2004. 

2003

Materials: Metal cages, motion sensors, fake birds

Location: Beijing, China

2001

Medium: Mixed media installation/ computer monitors

Location: Asia Society, New York, USA

Commissioned as a permanent installation by the Asia Society in New York, this work consists of a series of four flat computer monitors of diminishing size mounted sequentially on a wall at Asia Society headquarters. Words rendered in Xu's invented Square Word Calligraphy first appeare on the largest monitor. The characters then begin to break apart and move across the first screen, disappearing and then reappearing on the second and third screens in a continuous motion. Arriving at the last screen, the characters reassemble into ordinary English script, revealing a text-book conversation beginning with the phrase ''Excuse me sir, can you tell me how to get to the Asia Society?''

Xu’s text, evoking the phraseology of an elementary English-as-a-second language textbook, points to the shared experiences of new immigrants to the United States. By presenting a request for directions to viewers who are already physically at the Asia Society, this installation poses a deeper existential question: ''Where are we, in reality?'' Experienced within the specific environs of the so-called ''Asia Society New York,'' Xu's work plays with the concept ''I am within you, you are within me,'' which echoes the exploration of the same concept in his Square World Calligraphy.

2000

Materials: printed post-its.

This work was created for an exhibition at the Ginza Graphic Gallery in Japan examining the dynamic changes taking place in the book industry in the countries that utilize Chinese characters in their language systems, namely Japan, Korea, and China. Xu's work focuses on the conept of language and digitalization. The title of the work is derived from a passage in the classic 15th-century Chinese novel Journey to the West, in which the supernatural monkey, Sun Wukong, fiercely battles with a demon but finds himself on the losing end. Employing the mystical technique of ''shen wai shen'' (which can roughly be translated as self-cloning in modern terms), Sun Wukong takes a strand of his own hair and places it in his mouth, thereby releasing thousands of miniature replicas of himself. These tiny clones then join forces to overcome and ultimately defeat the demon. 

Using Chinese, Japanese, and Korean, respectively, to transcribe passages from the tale, the artist displays each version on separate panels mounted on the wall, with each character inscribed on its own small, square notebook. Audience members are invited to freely tear off sheets of characters, unexpectedly revealing underneath a word written in a different language. This intentional random mixing of languages in this artwork creates a narrative that resermbles a collage of different texts. This juxtaposition of languages generates a sense of cacophony, reflecting the complexity of linguistic diversity in a multicultural world. However, amidst this apparent chaos, there are moments when the random mixing of words restores a sense of normalcy and coherence, highlighting the interconnectedness of languages. 

On the reverse side of each sheet of paper, Xu Bing's website address, http://www.xubing.com, is inscribed. One implication of the work is the notion that with the facilitation of internet technology, one can attain something of the magical ability for self-generation, bearing semblance to that of the supernatural monkey’s own methods of endless reproduction in the story. 

1997

Medium: Mixed media installation / prints of a factory floor on its wall, old printing press

The site of Berlin’s Asian Fine Art Factory was once used in the early 20th century by the German Communist party as an underground publishing house and gathering place. It was later requisitioned by the Nazis as a holding area for deportees. Type blocks, still embedded in its gallery floors, are used here as the medium of Xu Bing’s Lost Letters. Because these rooms once housed printers, Xu Bing was interested in the historicity of the floors, in how the images they contain might once more be transferred onto paper. The artist used newspaper-sized sheaves of paper to make rubbings of these imprints. These papers were then mounted alongside a vintage printing press fitted with intentionally inverted metal type plates, to mimic the effect of the floor prints. This work reflects Xu’s interest in history as palimpsest with its different “versions” overlaying each other, waiting to be discovered.

1996－2006

Medium: Multiple languages translation

This project experiments with the potential and extent of transference between different languages. Approach: the project begins with the translation of a page of Chinese text into English; the English text is translated into French, from French into Russian, and then, following this method, through German, Spanish, Japanese, and Thai. Finally, it is translated back into Chinese. A comparison of the first and last Chinese versions reveals the extent of the disparity between the two. As of the writing of this introduction, the chain translation project is still in mid-process (right now it is being converted from Spanish to Japanese), but how will it end? I myself do not know. Perhaps it will be a complete perversion of the original, perhaps it won’t be that awful (which would be better, for this would show that translations, upon which we have relied for many years, are still fundamentally trustworthy).

The project began ten years ago with New York curator Octavio Zaya, but it never got off the ground. One day Ocatavia unexpectedly caught wind of another artist who was undertaking a similar project, and I could only agree to stop (even though second hand information is unreliable). Yet, for the last ten years, I have searched the web and made every possible inquiry, but have never seen mention of this project. And my thoughts often turn to this “pitiful” plan. 

Later, I realized that an American game called “telephone” is played just this way. You whisper a sentence to me, I whisper it to my neighbor, and then it finally returns to the last person in the chain who reveals how the original statement has changed(I imagine a similar sort of game exists in China as well). The game, which has been handed down from children, is simple to the extent that it mirrors real life, yet it is imbued with philosophical undertones. This species of game is also used in American universities and research institutions: for instance, in management communication classes. Students are divided into two groups and given the same appliance. One group starts the process of constructing the appliance as it transmits each section of the instructions to the other group. The results of the groups can be entirely dissimilar. This experiment examines the degree of error between direct and transmitted communication. It discusses how managers can effectively transmit directions. The skill of translating is also a skill of transmitting. 

The original Chinese text was selected from Columbia Professor Lydia H. Liu’s book “Cross-writing: Critical Perspectives on Narratives of Modern Intellectual History.” I had wanted to find a passage which like many…… But I discovered that her style is clear and simple, and it was difficult to find a passage that can easily be misunderstood. But it is only by starting from normal prose that the reliability of this experiment can be proven. 

Thank you Lydia, and also a big thanks to the translators around the world who warmly participated in this project.

-- Xu Bing 25 April, 2006, New York

1993

Medium: Mixed media installation / Braille books and book covers

This work, which combines the words “braille” and “illiterate” in its title, features a reading room equipped with a table stacked with books. The covers of these books have been altered by the artist to feature English titles superimposed over the original braille titles. However, in actuality, the English titles are completely different from the braille titles, and bear no relation to the actual content of the books. Upon opening the books, a sighted viewer might expect to find an English text inside, but instead discovers pages printed in braille. The content of the braille pages would be assumed to correspond to the English title on the cover. Conversely, a blind viewer who is literate in braille, unaware of the misleading English title, would not know that sighted readers had a completely wrong impression of the book's content. As such, Brailliterate acts as an experiment to explore how the same object can be interpreted by different viewers in completely different ways. Only those who possess both full visual capacity and knowledge in braille would be able to fully grasp the deception at play. This provcative work raises important questions about cultural bias, misinterpretation, and the potential for concealment within our understanding and communication. 

1992－1993

Medium: Installation of printed and bound books with religious and secular texts

Dimension: varies; 35 × 45 × 8 cm each book (closed)

This installation consists of 300 specially printed and bound volumes titled Post Testament. Within these books is an unusual hybrid text, combining the King James’ version of the New Testament with a trashy, contemporary novel by alternating each word of the two texts. This unique arrangement requires the reader to skip every word in order to read either complete text. Regardless of which narrative the reader follows, the visual presence of the other narrative cannot be avoided, leaving a lasting imprint in the reader’s mind. The hybrid text thus presents a new and unconventional reading pattern. With Post Testament, Xu Bing attempts to experiment with the relation between avant-garde literature and visual art.

1991

Materials: Unglazed terracotta installation/woodblock

The theme of Xu Bing’s artwork A, B, C… is centered around the awkwardness and limitations inherent to cross-cultural communication. It consists of thirty-eight ceramic cubes, each representing a sort of transliteration from the twenty-six letters of the Roman alphabet to Chinese characters. The chosen characters are selected based on their pronunciation, creating sounds equivalent to the corresponding Roman letters that they represent. 

The Chinese characters are carved on the top face of each ceramic block in the form of a printer's stamp, while the Roman letter is printed on the side. For example, the English letter “A” is rendered by the Chinese “ai,” which means sadness. “B” is rendered “bi,” which means land on the other side, on the other shore. Some letters require two or three Chinese characters to transliterate. For example, “W” is rendered “da,” “bu,” “liu,” which mean big, cloth, and six, respectively. This activity begins with a logical pattern, but ultimately deviates from its intended meaning. Due to the loss of the original context and semantic connections, the resulting transliteral language increasingly appears meaningless and absurd.

2001, 2008

Materials: Lacquer on baltic birch wood (2001)

                  Lacquer on fiber (2008)

Location: Arthur M. Sackler Gallery, Smithsonian Institution, Washington D.C., USA (2001)

                U.S. Embassy, Beijing, China (2008)

The idea for this installation originated from a Chinese idiom, "monkeys grasp for the moon," which alludes to an ancient folktale. The tale narrates the story of a group of monkeys who, perched on a branch of a tree, catch sight of the reflection of the moon in a pool of water below. In an attempt to touch what they perceive to be the real moon, the monkeys decide to link their arms and tails together. When at last they “touch” the moon, it vanishes as ripples disrupt its reflection in the water. This fanciful yet thought-provoking tale reminds us that what we strive to achieve may sometimes prove to be elusive illusions.

Xu Bing's own work, Monkeys Grasp for the Moon, presents a chain of monkeys formed wholly out of word shapes. Each link in the chain is the word for "monkey" in a different international language, including Hindi, Japanese, French, Spanish, Hebrew and English. These words are stylized to resemble monkeys themselves. Monkeys Grasp for the Moon extends through the heart of the Arthur M. Sackler Gallery's main staircase, suspended 90 feet from the skylight at the top of this atrium to a reflecting pool on the lowest floor of the gallery.