Xu Bing's Magical Mystery Tour

Patricia Eichenbaum Karetzky Xu Bing’s Magical Mystery Tour

u Bing’s recent installation Travelling to the Wonderland, which was on view in the John Madejski Garden Court of the Victoria and Albert Museum, London, is a marvel of good will X 1 ambassadorship. Distant from the bustling area of Knightsbridge, the constructed outdoor Chinese garden affords visitors a brief respite from the city’s noise and turmoil. The response of many of the viewers was one of delight: It’s a bit of China, isn’t it, here in the midst of London. But as a conceptual artist, Xu Bing has invested the work with multiple layers of meaning that may not have occurred to the occasional passersby. For one, as a contemporary literati artist, Xu Bing has chosen for his inspiration a prose poem, Peach Blossom Spring, written by Dao Qian in 421 A.D. that described the exploits of a ﬁsherman who, passing a cove ﬁlled with peach trees in bloom, moored his boat and then followed a stream only to discover a hidden community living peacefully outside of the purview of

76 Vol. 13 No. 1 Xu Bing, Travelling to the Wonderland, 2013, site-speciﬁc ÃÌ>>ÌÊ>ÌÊ6VÌÀ>Ê>`Ê Albert Museum, London. Photo: Fang Chao. Courtesy of Xu Bing Studio.

contemporary society. To further the viewer’s appreciation of the work, Xu Bing has written out the Dao Qian prose poem in his Square English calligraphy style and it hangs in a nearby gallery dedicated to Chinese art, reading as follows:

During the reign period T’ai yuan (326–97) of the Chin dynasty there lived in Wu-ling a certain fisherman. One day, as he followed the course of a stream, he became unconscious of the distance he had travelled. All at once he came upon a grove of blossoming peach trees which lined either bank for hundreds of paces. No tree of any other kind stood amongst them, but there were fragrant flowers, delicate and lovely to the eye, and the air was filled with drifting peach bloom.

The fisherman, marveling, passed on to discover where the grove would end. It ended at a spring; and then there came a hill. In the side of the hill was a small opening which seemed to promise a gleam of light. The fisherman left his boat and entered the opening. It was almost too cramped at first to afford him passage; but when he had taken a few dozen steps he emerged into the open light of day. He faced a spread of level land. Imposing buildings stood among rich fields and pleasant ponds all set with mulberry and willow. Linking paths led everywhere, and the fowls and dogs of one farm could be heard from the next. People were coming and going and working in the fields. Both the men and the women dressed in exactly the same manner as people outside; white haired elders and tufted children alike were cheerful and contented.

Some, noticing the ﬁsherman, started in great surprise and asked him where he had come from. He told them his

Vol. 13 No. 1 77 story. Then they invited him to their home, where they set out wine and killed chickens for a feast. When news of his coming spread through the village, everyone came in to question him. For their part, they told how their forefathers, ﬂeeing the troubles of the age of Ch’in, had come with their wives and neighbors to this isolated place, never to leave it. From that time on they had been cut off from the outside world. They asked what age this was this: they had never even heard of the Han, let alone it successors the Wei and Chin. The ﬁsherman answered each of their questions in full, and they sighed and wondered at what he had to tell. The rest all invited him to their homes in turn and in each house food and wine were set before him. It was only after a stay of several days that he took his leave.

“Do not speak of us to the people outside” they said. But when he had regained his boat and was retracing his original route, he marked it at point after point; and on reaching the prefecture he sought audience of the prefect and told him of all these things. The prefect immediately dispatched ofﬁcers to go back with the ﬁsherman. He hunted for the marks he had made, but grew confused and never found the way again.

The learned and virtuous hermit Liu Tzu-chi heard the story and went off elated to ﬁnd the place. But he had no success, and died at length of sickness. Since that time there have been no further “seekers of the ford.”2

On the most obvious level, Xu Bing’s garden installation re-creates this hidden land, providing Londoners with solace from the urban disorder outside. And in selecting this poem, Xu Bing engaged a topic that has enchanted literati and artists throughout China’s long history. Many painters rendered the Peach Blossom Spring in detailed and elaborate landscape settings using the ancient blue and green style, popular in the Tang dynasty, replete with small-scale narrative details. In these works, the viewer goes on a journey, following the boatman to the village past the peach blossoms.3 Xu Bing similarly re-creates the experience of the story and the destination, but in real time.

Creating the Illusion In accord with the poem’s narrative, Xu Bing built his utopia around a large fountain and encircled it with actual pieces of mountain transported from China. The scale and complexity of the project is mind-boggling: First, large slabs of rock were cut from the ﬁve major mountains of China and shipped to his workplace in Beijing. The stones, of various sizes, weigh as much

78 Vol. 13 No. 1 Picking stones for Travelling as two tons. Processing included to the Wonderland, 2013. Courtesy of Xu Bing Studio. cleaning and covering the rocks with varnish and then photographing, measuring, and cataloguing each one of them. There are six groups of stones, among them Taihu rocks from Lake Tai in Jiangsu province, Guwen (Morie) stone found around Suzhou, Taishan stones from Shandong, Ling Bi from Anhui, and rocks from Fangshan near Beijing. Acquiring such rocks was a pursuit once limited only to the emperor and the uppermost echelons of society. So prized were garden stones, sometimes called scholar’s rocks, that since the Han dynasty (206 BC–220 AD) imperial emissaries were dispatched to search the nation in an effort to acquire excellent examples for the imperial gardens, where they carefully were placed in various settings—in courtyards and around bodies of water like those in the existing Ming gardens of Suzhou and Hangzhou.4 Catalogues written as early as the Song dynasty (960–1126 A.D.) extolled the virtues of famous stones. For Xu Bing, clearly the stones are the major component of the installation, and he has engaged in the same rock collecting endeavour as his precursors. In fact, the scale of his undertaking dwarfs historical precedent. But it should be noted that Xu Bing’s fascination with the theme of rocks is not unique among contemporary Chinese artists. The rock garden has captivated some of the most prominent artists working today, among them Cai Guoqiang,5 Zhan Wang,6 Sui Jianguo,7 Liu Dan,8 Hong Lei,9 and Wenda Gu.10

Details of stones for Travelling to the Wonderland, 2013. Courtesy of Xu Bing Studio. Next page: Stones for Travelling to the Wonderland being catalogued in a warehouse, 2013. Photo: Pan Hong. Courtesy of Xu Bing Studio.

The conception of the installation was worked out in minute detail in Xu Bing’s studio during the summer of 2013. Once the stones were identified with painted numbers and catalogued, Xu Bing and his crew took small photos/prints of each of them and composed them into a small-scale rendering of the proposed site. The project was laden with innumerable logistical difficulties—especially procuring and transporting tons of rock overseas. During an interview in his studio this summer, Xu Bing explained the project to me, and he seemed both horrified and delighted with the challenge. Xu Bing re-created the approximate real geographical relationships of the different mountains in the placement of the rocks around the oval fountain. Each geographical area was represented by dozens

Vol. 13 No. 1 79 80 Vol. 13 No. 1 Vol. 13 No. 1 81 Maquette of Travelling to the Wonderland at Xu Bing Studio, 2013. Courtesy of Xu Bing Studio.

Xu Bing, Travelling to the Wonderland (details), 2013, Photo: Fang Chao. Courtesy of Xu Bing Studio.

of variously sized stones. For stability, in case of wind pressure, they were attached to the edge of the pool ﬂoor by steel bolts.

But this is just the framework of the final installation. Xu Bing further explained to me that he wanted to re-create a Chinese landscape painting, first by slicing the stones thinly, thereby reducing their sculptural attributes, and by embellishing them with narrative details. Thus Xu Bing populated the thin slivers of rock with anecdotal details: there are tiny clay houses, groups of buildings approximating a small village, mountain-top temples, forests, a waterfall, and both exotic and familiar animals and birds scattered about. There are even schools of tiny simulated fish in the pond, and in the centre of the pond sits an isolated group of buildings, like a lost empire; as the peach blossom spring was a rural community, the identity of this

82 Vol. 13 No. 1 element is somewhat enigmatic. These miniaturized elements make up a world resembling a ﬁshbowl or bonsai composition articulated with human and architectural elements including pagoda, bridges, and ﬁshermen. In accord with the poem, two areas have great sprays of plastic pink and white peach blossoms. In addition, Xu Bing sought to evoke the mist that rises from the mountains by employing complicated equipment and even producing a rainbow effect that was achieved through special lamps. Animated videos projected on the small clay houses show cartoon- like inhabitants.

Left and right: Xu Bing, Travelling to the Wonderland (details), 2013, Photo: Fang Chao. Courtesy of Xu Bing Studio.

Xu Bing, Travelling to the Wonderland (details), 2013, Photo: Fang Chao. Courtesy of Xu Bing Studio.

Thus the viewer, when walking around the installation, experiences incidental scenes like the reader of a Chinese landscape painting does— moving in and out of perspectival depth and back and forth across the composition. This style of landscape painting reached its climax of representational skill in Song dynasty-period painting, where the size of

Vol. 13 No. 1 83 the human actors, houses, and temples, etc., was one-hundredth that of the mountains that were depicted. Although the size of the ﬁgures in Chinese painting grew over time in relation to the natural elements, they always remained considerably smaller, as they are in Xu Bing’s Travelling to the Wonderland. In a gallery nearby in the museum, there is a temporary exhibit of masterpieces of Chinese painting that allows the viewer to compare the experience of the garden installation with the experience of traditional painting.11

Xu Bing has succeeded in mimicking for the British audience the experience of viewing a Chinese landscape as well as in familiarizing them somewhat with China’s geography and culture. When visitors encircle the installation they encounter hidden grottos, Buddha sculptures, and the ﬂora and fauna of each region from which the rocks have been extracted. In this way, a microcosm of China is experienced, which was the most ancient function of gardens. Scholars viewed stones as a microcosm of the universe: Du Wan (c. 1127–1132), in his catalogue of famous stones, Stone Compendium of Cloudy Forest (Yulin shipu), explained how they represented spiritual forces: the “purest essence of the energy of the heaven-earth coalesces into rock. . . . Within the size of a ﬁst can be assembled the beauty of a thousand cliffs.12

The temporal element of experiencing the garden is enhanced with Xu Bing’s inclusion of the four seasons within Travelling to the Wonderland— each area has natural details common to a speciﬁc time of year, and for the viewer he has presented a ﬁctive unfolding of the seasons. Time is also represented in the contrast between the present and this enchanted evocation of the past— the appreciation of antiquity is an essential feature of the literati’s experience of the arts. The work conveys a sense of the disjunction of time that is essential to the telling of the story of the peach blossom spring, where the people live cut off from contemporary society.

The Theme of the Peach Blossom Spring The poem Peach Blossom Spring embraces a number of themes associated with the life and work of its author, Dao Qian, who left the political arena to live as an impoverished recluse, surrounded by friends, family, and wine. Dao Qian’s rejection of ofﬁcial society was a result of his judgment against its turmoil, dishonesty, and corruption:

My instinct is all for freedom and will not brook discipline or restraint. Hunger and cold may be sharp, but this going against myself really sickens me. Whenever I have been involved in ofﬁcial life I was mortgaging myself to my mouth and my belly, and the realization of this greatly upset me. I was deeply ashamed that I had so compromised my principles.13

In his retirement he tended his garden, read, and wrote. Anticipating his death, he extolled the virtues of a simple life: 84 Vol. 13 No. 1 Raise me no mound, plant me no grove; time will pass with the revolving sun and moon. I never cared for praise in my lifetime and it matters not at all what eulogies are sung after my death. Man’s life is hard enough in truth; and death is not to be avoided.14

Dao Qian’s contempt for the double dealing of a society bent on greed and the worship of fame is also evident in his poem which describes how the inhabitants of the Peach Blossom Spring sought protection from the maniacal First Emperor Qin Shi Huangdi’s (259–210 BC) corruption and persecution, so much so that one hundred years after, they still feared discovery. What is more, their community is described in the poem as a Daoist utopia using terms found in the scripture of Daodejing, which asserts that when the government stays out of peoples’ affairs, they can achieve harmony and peace:

Live peacefully and delight in your own society; dwell within cock-crow of your neighbours. But maintain your independence from them.15

But the fisherman who accidentally discovers the community cannot tolerate it. More than that, despite their entreaties, he plans to uncover their location by leaving markers along the way to aid an official search party. This is a condemnation of the fisherman, and perhaps humanity, who could not tolerate harmony and tried to destroy it. It should also be considered that this complicated prose poem also suggests, as the author Lou Yueh (1137–1213) proposed, that this land may not actually exist, as it was never found by those who went to search for it.16 It may have been an illusion, thus maybe such peaceful places cannot be found on earth.

Because of its allusions to Daoism, since the Tang dynasty the poem was read as a description of a Daoist fairyland whose inhabitants were immortals, Susan Nelson explains,

The peach blossoms at the entrance of the secret land stir intimations of immortality, which is symbolized by the peach; the tunnel entrance suggests the grotto paradises, and the stream the nourishing “spirit fount” of Taoist lore; and the fact that the land was never seen again parallels the mystic disappearances of paradises of the fantasy genre.17

The Daoist scholar Stephen Bokemcamp found an early Daoist scripture that, predating the poem, narrated a similar story. He summarizes:

Both interlopers come upon a place of habitation, but, while the Recluse ﬁnds only footprints and cart tracks, the

Vol. 13 No. 1 85 ﬁsherman of T’ao’s account meets the cavern residents. Both men report their ﬁnds to the proper authorities, though the cavern paradise is inaccessible to the less worthy, regardless of rank and status. This might explain why T’ao placed his wondrous peach trees outside the grotto. The peaches are easily obtainable and the secret of the cavern really nothing so mysterious at all.18

Bokemkamp goes on to suggest that “the poem was indeed critical of the single-minded pursuit of Daoist wonders, probably on the part of some acquaintance” of the poet.19 A rationalist stance was also taken by the Song literati Su Shi (1037–1101), who, challenging the religious connotations, proposed a more sensible approach: the people of the cove were not immortals but descendants of those who ﬂed the Qin Emperor.20 In either case, as Nelson has pointed out, the vast majority of illustrations favour a mystical portrayal.21 There also is a reading which asserts that the land was utopian, but the boatman, representative of human nature, could not tolerate it. (Mark Twain’s preference for hell over heaven comes to mind.)

Xu Bing, American Silkworm Series, 1994, mixed media. Exposing the Illusion Courtesy of Xu Bing Studio. Travelling to the Wonderland may be seen within the context of Xu Bing’s artistic career. Since his earliest projects he has worked with writing, language, and calligraphy, winning him the moniker of a modern literati.22 For example, his Book from the Sky consisted of him composing four thousand nonsensical characters printed as a book, which was later placed in a contemporary context with a large-scale installation of pages of printed texts.23 Living abroad at that time, Xu Bing sought to enhance the experience of Chinese writing for Westerners and designed New English Calligraphy (1994) transforming the letters of English words into square boxes that resemble Chinese script. Though the Book from the Sky transmitted a meaningless text, the works in New English Calligraphy were legible, though they required time and patience to comprehend. As a diasporic artist, many of his projects stressed strong identiﬁcation with Chinese culture, like the American Silkworm Series (1994). Here, he also began to engage with Chinese landscape painting, and it became the subject of several of his artistic inventions, and Travelling to the Wonderland is surely an extension of this pursuit.

Like so many of Xu Bing’s works, Travelling to the Wonderland also has a strong didactic intention; that is, to familiarize Europeans with Chinese culture. In keeping with his career as an educator and Vice President of the Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing, several of his projects have a boldly educational tone. Square Calligraphy Classroom (1994) was a schoolroom

86 Vol. 13 No. 1 Xu Bing, Square Calligraphy Classroom, 1996, installation. Courtesy of Xu Bing Studio.

Xu Bing, Your Surname Please, 1998, installation. Courtesy of Xu Bing Studio.

Xu Bing, Book from the demonstration of writing the new Ground, 2003, installation. Courtesy of Xu Bing Studio. graphs, an audience interactive component activity later held in conjunction with a 2001 –02 solo exhibition of his art, Word Play, at the Smithsonian Museum in Washington, D.C. Viewer participation also was required in Your Surname Please (1998) in which a computer translated the subject’s name into the new square calligraphy. First Readers (2003) is composed of small glass sculptures that emulate

Vol. 13 No. 1 87 children’s reading toys. Sandblasted on the surface of each ambiguous shape Xu Bing, Post Testament, 1992, installation. Courtesy of Xu is an English word and a Chinese word; and although both the English and Bing Studio. the Chinese deﬁnitions correspond with the form of the sculpture, their meanings humorously disagree with each other. Xu Bing has explained his recent project Book From the Ground (2003–12) on his Web site and in articles; it too requires instructions for the audience, who are asked to type on a computer messages using the new picture language he created from public signage.24

But as First Readers suggests, Xu Bing often has other agendas, one of which is to expose the falsity and limits of communication beginning with the pseudo characters of the Book From The Sky that look legible but in fact are gibberish. This is also evident in Post Testament (1992), where the books reproduced are either incorrectly titled or consist of strange hybrid texts. The contrast between expectation and actuality is fundamental to his landscape works that began in 1999 with Landscript in which he rendered a seemingly lifelike landscape, but closer inspection revealed that he used Chinese ciphers for the geographical elements: the characters for stone, tree, mountain, stream, etc., comprised the composition.25 In another series, Background Story, that was initiated in 2004 and is ongoing, Xu Bing re-created famous literati monochrome landscapes using materials from nature—clay, stones, trees, and leaves—that are placed behind an opaque piece of glass and illuminated from behind. From a distance these works look like large-scale handscroll landscape paintings, but walking around to the back exposes the raw materials that make up the composition. The work is a tour de force that surprises the viewer and challenges one to not only interpret the genre from which this work is derived, but its

88 Vol. 13 No. 1 Xu Bing, Background Story, modern re-creation as well. As in Travelling to the Wonderland, Xu Bing 2011, installation. Courtesy of Xu Bing Studio. has deconstructed the paintings and refashioned them as relief sculpture using natural materials. But, as Richard Harrist observes, the back of the hand scroll re-creation was executed in an intentionally sloppy manner to more emphatically expose the illusion.26 At the same time, Xu Bing created a “virtual landscape,” and in this way Harrist posits Xu Bing creates a historical dialogue between the actual object and the virtual re-creation of it in a different in scale and medium. The shock of discovery is explained as the insight of a Zen master:

Ultimately the filter that Xu Bing wishes us to understand probably is that of the mind itself—a filter woven from our cultures, languages and personal histories. The filter of the mind grants only limited access to the world, but it is through this imperfect screen, both opaque and translucent, receptive to some stimuli but oblivious to others, that art and reality are perceived”27

Travelling to the Wonderland also conveys the disparity between the ideal of the garden and its manufacture. A statement placed at the entrance to the garden explains that the artist fully intended that the mechanics of the construction of the garden and its magical effects be exposed to view:

This ethereal landscape created by the artist Xu Bing. Xu was inspired by the classic Chinese fable, Tao Hua Yuan, or Peach Blossom Spring. Written in 421, Peach Blossom Spring tells the story of a lost ﬁsherman who discovers a land

Vol. 13 No. 1 89 90 Vol. 13 No. 1 Xu Bing, night view of behind a mountain where people lead an ideal existence in Travelling to the Wonderland, Óä£Î]Ê6VÌÀ>Ê>`ÊLiÀÌÊ harmony with nature, unaware of the outside world. Museum, London. Photo: Fang Chao. Courtesy of Xu Bing Studio. The installation was built up of finely cut stones collected from five different places in China. It is a feature of Xu Bing’s work to show us that everything is not as it may seem at first. In plain sight, behind and among the mountains are the machines, cables and LCD screens that create this utopian scene.

Electric lights, the fog machine, the tiny plastic animals, and fake plum blossoms are revealed for what they are—artless components of an installation. The effect is not unlike that of a scroll painting of the Peach Blossom Spring by the famous early Qing literati painter Shitao (Tao Qi), who uniquely begins his composition with a pleasant land of peace and prosperity and then, as the viewer unrolls the long scroll, ﬁnds at the end a composition that conveys a sense of loss and physical certitude.28 As Susan Nelson observes,

The political implications of T’ao Yuan-ming’s story, its pessimism and sense of involvement, made themselves felt in paintings such as these in a more urgent and human interpretation of the escapist theme; in many ways they seem close to the spirit in which T’ao, living through parallel historical events, must have conceived it.29

Perhaps the intent of the exposed mechanics of the installation is, as Xu Bing says in the plaque, to expose the viewer to the illusions of life, and, perhaps, in the context of the poem, to encourage the viewer to see that the pursuit of proﬁt and fame is, as Dao Qian found, ultimately a vain delusion.

So too the viewer of the garden, aware of the mechanics, is expelled from utopia. I spoke with over a dozen visitors, asking how they found the experience. They replied that it was lovely to have this garden available to them and to have this chance to become familiar with Chinese culture. When asked how they felt about the obvious technical machinery, often poorly executed scenarios, and blatantly fake ﬂowers, one man replied, “I tried to ignore it.” In fact, many thought the garden was unﬁnished, while others replied it would be better viewed at night when such unseemly details were less readily apparent. As I was told, however, the garden is closed at night.

Vol. 13 No. 1 91 Notes 1 On view November 1, 2013–March 2, 2014. 2 This version is translated by Cyril Byrch in Anthology of Chinese Literature, Volume I: From Early Times to the Fourteenth Century, ed. Cyril Birch (New York: Grove Press, 1965), 167–68. 3 Richard M. Barnhart, Peach Blossom Spring (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1983), ﬁgure 41, 114–15, illustrates Peach Blossom Spring, by Yuan Chiang (active 1690–1746) comprising twelve hanging scrolls. To view a digital version of a scroll of Peach Blossom Spring, attributed to Qiu Ying (ca. 1494–1552) but executed in the seventeenth century, with ink and colour on paper, 33 x 472 cm, now in the Boston Museum of Art (accession number 56.494), see http://scrolls.uchicago.edu/scroll/ peach-blossom-spring/. 4 Yang Hongxun, Classical Chinese Gardens (New York: Van Nostrand Reinhold, 1982), 59. 5 See Cai Guo-Qiang, Garden Within a Garden, and Cai Guo-Qiang: Flying Dragon in the Heavens, 1997, http://www.caiguoqiang.com/projects/garden-within-garden/. 6 See Zhan Wang’s polished stainless steel re-creations of garden rocks, http://www.saatchigallery. com/artists/zhan_wang.htm/. 7 For Sui Jianguo’s river rock series of 1990, see http://www.suijianguo.com/. 8 For Liu Dan’s installation Illusions of the Old Man Rock I–X, featuring nine rock paintings with a 30-foot-long hand-scroll of an imagined landscape wrapping the exterior of the circle at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, see http://www.mfa.org/media/detail/261/94/. 9 Hong Lei did several images of Garden rocks in Decay Series, 2006; see http://www.chinese- avantgarde.com/hong-lei.html/. 10 For example, Wenda Gu’s B/W rocks with characters, ink on paper, 83 x 152 cm; see http://www.mfa. org/collections/object/b-w-rocks-with-characters-378956/. 11 Masterpieces of Chinese Painting 700–1900, Victoria and Albert Museum, October 26, 2013–January 19, 2014, http://www.vam.ac.uk/content/exhibitions/masterpieces-of-chinese-painting/Exhibit/. 12 Stephen Little, Spirit Stones of China (Chicago: Art Institute of Chicago, 1999), 16. 13 James R. Hightower, The Poetry of T’ao Ch’ien (Oxford: Clarendon,1970), 5. 14 Ibid., 6. 15 The Daodejing compilation is attributed to Laozi; it was assembled as early as fourth century. For Verse 80, see http://www.sacred-texts.com/tao/ttx/ttx02.htm/: Let your community be small, with only a few people; Keep tools in abundance, but do not depend upon them; Appreciate your life and be content with your home; Sail boats and ride horses, but don’t go too far; Keep weapons and armour, but do not employ them; Let everyone read and write, Eat well and make beautiful things. Live peacefully and delight in your own society; Dwell within cockcrow of your neighbours, But maintain your independence from them. 16 Susan E. Nelson, “The Peach Blossom Spring as Paradise Source,” Archives of Asian Art 39 (1986), 23–47, 29, cites the author Lou Yueh’s (1137–1213) statement that the Peach Blossom Spring community did not actually exist. 17 Ibid., 25. 18 Stephen R. Bokenkamp, “The Peach Flower Font and the Grotto Passage,” Journal of the American Oriental Society 106, no. 1, Sinological Studies Dedicated to Edward H. Schafer (January–March 1986), 65–77. 19 Ibid., 22. 20 Nelson, “The Peach Blossom Spring as Paradise Source,” 28. 21 Ibid., 30. 22 Patricia Karetzky, “A Modern Literati: The Art of Xu Bing,” Oriental Art XLVII, no. 4 (2001), 47–62. 23 Xubing.com: “Mixed media installation / Hand-printed books and scrolls printed from blocks inscribed with ‘false’ characters. An installation that took Xu Bing over four years to complete, A Book from The Sky is comprised of printed volumes and scrolls containing four thousand ‘false’ Chinese characters invented by the artist and then painstakingly hand-cut onto wooden printing blocks.” The Web site also includes description of other works mentioned in the current text. 24 Xu Bing, “Regarding Book from the Ground,” Yishu: Journal of Contemporary Chinese Art 6, no. 2, June 2007. 25 Reiko Tomli, David Elliot, Robert E. Harrist, Jr., and Andrew Solomon, Xu Bing (London: Albion, 2011), 212. 26 Robert E.Harrist Jr. “Background Stories: Xu Bing’s Art of Transformation,” in Tomli et al., Xu Bing, 2011, 35, lists the several versions of Backstory. 27 Ibid., 42. 28 Copy of Yuanji (Shitao, 1641–1707), Peach Blossom Spring, ink and colour, height approximately 25 cm, Freer Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., Gift of C.C. Wang and family, F1982.26; see http://www. asia.si.edu/collections/singleObject.cfm?ObjectNumber=F1982.26/. 29 Nelson, “The Peach Blossom Spring as Paradise Source," 41.

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