Xu Bing's new installation: When words take flight

 By Dan Bischoff/For The Star-Ledger

NEW YORK — Xu Bing is a quiet man behind owlish glasses who has the fugitive stoop of a scholar, and his entire career as an international artist has always been intertwined with the written word.

 

The big glass cube Renzo Piano designed for the lobby of the Morgan Library & Museum is, therefore, kind of perfect for Xu. It looks like a zoo aviary, and in that space, from floor to ceiling, Xu has traced the shape of the Chinese character for “bird” across time like a flock rising from a flat lake, each reiteration hanging on scores of tiny, glittering monofilaments.

The sculpture starts on the floor, with the dictionary definition of the Chinese word, transliterated as “niao,” printed in English below the traditional calligraphic rendering of its character in black paint.

Chinese characters evolved for painting with a brush in dark inks, and drawing the characters with a flourish has been a form of Chinese poetry forever. Every character carries much wider expressive qualities than any diphthong you can print out in a Western tongue.

Beyond all that, the language has undergone metamorphosis over its long history, and one of the most far-reaching changes came not so long ago under Mao, who simplified all the main characters radically for easier printing. Xu has cut the shapes of each of these transformations out of acrylic, ending with the graceful, three-stroke-winged Neolithic petroglyph for “niao,” which does indeed look just like a bird in flight, just below the ceiling.

So what you have is a sort of hanging three-dimensional chart, starting in the upper left portion of the lobby and ranging down, by stages, from ancient stone carvings, through Ching and Ming calligraphic shapes cut for seal stamps, to the simplified Mao printed character, and ending with the traditional, brush-stroke Mandarin expression of “niao.” The history of a word’s evolution depicted backward in descending order.

“Or you could put it the other way, and say the bird is escaping its definition,” Xu said last week during the installation, helped along occasionally by his assistant acting as interpreter. “The dictionary defines ‘bird’ as an animal with feathers whose front legs are adapted for flying and back legs for walking, and I do not think the bird would like that definition very much.”

 

Escaping is very much to the point, too. Chinese is among the oldest and most conservative languages spoken. The roots of modern word shapes in calligraphy, and calligraphy’s own roots in seals and petroglyphs, are well known. In fact, in the early 20th century a Harvard philosophy grad and expatriate to Japan, Ernest Fenollosa, developed a theory of learning Chinese by simply seeing through the shapes of characters to their traditional, underlying visual symbolism, like reading hieroglyphics (Fenollosa’s work went on to exert great influence on poets Ezra Pound and William Butler Yeats). 

The irony is that, while the Neolithic representation of “niao” is an unmistakable shorthand drawing of a bird in flight, the traditional Mandarin rendering on the museum floor, with its five parallel cross bars and four feather-like bottom strokes, looks more than anything like a traditional Chinese birdcage.

The color scheme of “The Living Word,” ranging from a light sunny ochre on the Neolithic shape down through a rosy “hydrangea” to light green, slate grey, and finally black on the floor, hints at a similar progression. It is, as Xu says, a “rainbow” fading into black.

Xu Bing, who was born in Chongqing, first gained international recognition in the late 1980s for his “Book from the Sky,” an installation of many scrolls inscribed with what appeared to be traditional Chinese characters but were in fact gibberish made up by the artist. That was widely interpreted as a statement about the unreliability of the written word by an artist who had spent two years laboring in the countryside during the Cultural Revolution.

“The Living Word” is much more manifold in its meaning. Xu Bing, who’s lived in New York since 1990, is nonetheless quite clear. Asked about the current cause célèbre in the art world, the arrest and later release (on promise of a $1.8 million “fine”) of artist Ai Weiwei, Xu looked up and locked gazes, saying quickly and in English, “It’s good that he is free.”

Xu Bing: The Living Word
Where: The Morgan Library & Museum, 225 Madison Ave., New York
When: Through Oct. 2. Open 10:30 a.m.-5 p.m. Tuesday-Thursday, 10:30 a.m.-9 p.m. Friday, 10 a.m.-6 p.m. Saturday, and 11 a.m.-6 p.m. Sunday.
How much: $15 for adults, $10 students and seniors, children younger than 12 admitted free; also free Fridays from 7 to 9 p.m. For more information, visit themorgan.org.

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