-The work references Chinese art forms: scrolls, screens, books, and paper -Four hundred handmade books are placed in rows on the ground -One walks beneath printed scrolls hanging from the ceiling -All of the Chinese characters are inventions of the artist and have no meaning -The artist uses traditional Asian wood-block techniques
-Original title: “An Analyzed Reflection of the End of This Century” -Originally in the National Museum of Fine Arts in Beijing; filled a large exhibition space -The artist lost favor with the Communist government over this work -Mounted at many venues in the west afterward -Xu Bing is a Chinese-born artist and U.S. resident -The artist was trained in the propagandistic socialist realist style; that background led to his critique of power in works such as this one -Criticized as “bourgeois liberation”; it was claimed that its meaninglessness hid secret subversions; others interpret the meaningless characters as reflecting meaningless words found in political double-speak.
Function
Context
-Additional