Göttergeflüster
Victor Mair:
The ultimate send-up of Chinese character formation is Xu Bing’s famous Tiānshū 天书 (A Book from the Sky), which consists entirely of characters that look like real characters, but are in fact all fake. When A Book from the Sky was first exhibited in Beijing in 1988, it caused enormous consternation, because those who came to view it felt that the characters were familiar, but no matter how hard they strained, they could not make sound or sense of a single character in the entire lot. Sounds and meanings could arbitrarily or imaginatively be assigned to each and every one of Xu Bing’s 4,000 characters from the sky. All of the strokes and all of the components are “legal” in the sense that they occur in officially authorized characters, but they have been combined in “illegal” ways. That is to say, they don’t add up to any characters that occur in historical texts or dictionaries. Once they realized that they had been “had”, conservative viewers were outraged because they thought that Xu Bing was making fun / light of them and their revered writing system. It wasn’t long before the exhibition closed and Xu fled to the United States in the aftermath of the Tiananmen Square Massacre.
I have met Xu Bing several times, e.g. once in his studio in New York and once at a lecture in Hong Kong, and I’ve gone to three or four of his exhibitions in the United States and have read his autobiographical and theoretical / critical writings […] Yet I have not been able to determine precisely what his intentions were in creating A Book from the Sky (though I certainly have my theories about what prompted him to spend so many years of exacting labour to produce such a monumental work of completely impenetrable “literary” art). To tell the truth, I do not think that Xu Bing himself knows exactly why he felt driven to produce this mind-boggling / jarring multi-volume book that makes no sense whatsoever.