‘Words divide, Images connect’: The politics of language and the language of politics in Xu Bing’s Book from the Sky and Book from the Ground

Abstract

Abstract Xu Bing’s Book from the Sky (1987–91) is widely regarded as one of the most important artworks in the global contemporary art canon; a spectacular installation comprised of an invented lexicon of 4000 pseudo-Chinese characters laboriously hand-carved and printed onto rice paper scrolls that is utterly illegible. Some two decades later, Xu published Book from the Ground: From Point to Point (2014), a 112-page ‘graphic novel’ written entirely in the international visual vernacular of emoji, icons and symbols culled from the Internet, which according to the artist, ‘virtually anyone can read’. This article explores how the artist’s long-standing preoccupation with visual over verbal forms of communication both plays to the idealization of the Chinese logograph as a model for a ‘new media literacy’ in the global imaginary, whilst also reflecting the culturally-coded anxieties centred on the murky politics of language, and the language of politics, in modern and contemporary China. Reading between the lines of what is touted to be an ‘open book’, it considers the degree to which the banal panoply of utterly conventional signs that constitute the Book from the Ground might be encrypted with a subversive subtext – one that is in dialogue with grassroots forms of online resistance that similarly play on the visual-verbal properties of the Chinese logograph to subvert the limitations placed on the seeable and sayable in contemporary China.