Xu Bing's Book from the Sky
Born in Chongqing, China in 1955, Xu Bing is a Macarthur fellow and an artist vibrantly at work in many media. His work frequently engages the lives of books and written and printed letters. For his best-known work, The Book from the Sky (1987–91), an installation in Canada’s National Gallery of Art, Xu Bing created some four thousand calligraphic characters of his own invention and printed scrolls and books with them; in final form, scrolls hang above ranks of books in soldierly order, as if manuscript reads print, or books dream of billowing in the sky. Later works explore the troubled boundary zone of Chinese and Western languages and scripts.
