Persistence/Transformation:
Text as Image in the Art of Xu Bing
Edited by Jerome Silbergeld & Dora C. Y. Ching

Paper | 2006 | $29.95 / £20.95
Cloth | 2006 | $58.00 / £39.95
104 pp. | 6 x 10 | 60 halftones.

Shopping Cart | Reviews

The calligrapher and book artist Xu Bing has been called the most innovative Chinese artist of our time. As a citizen of both China and the United States and the first Asian-American artist to win the prestigious MacArthur Foundation "genius award," Xu Bing has fascinated and challenged audiences around the world with his imaginative textual art. From his 4,000 unreadable Chinese-looking characters, which unite Asian and Western audiences alike in an egalitarianism of induced illiteracy, to his invention of a "square words" language that makes "Chinese" readable by anyone at all, Xu Bing's use of language is at once artistically brilliant, highly entertaining, and profoundly subversive--a sharp-witted, masterly word-play that, in his own words, "strikes at the very essence of culture."

In exhibitions on four continents, Xu Bing's printed art, mixed-media installations, and performance pieces--from books and calligraphic sculptures to inscribed pigs--have fascinated specialists and general audiences alike and generated a growing body of literature. This volume presents the first multidisciplinary study of Xu Bing's art and its intellectual implications. Included is an illuminating account by Xu Bing of his own work, as well as essays by leading scholars in a number of different fields.

The essays address the place of this work within the long history of Chinese calligraphic practice, examine it in the context of Chinese intellectual dissidence, discuss Japanese avant-garde parallels, and judge it from a Western art-historical viewpoint.

Review:

"The complex impact of [Xu Bing's] work, as well as its considerable intricacy, comes through clearly in Persistence/Transformation: Text as Image in the Art of Xu Bing. . . . This is a fascinating--and exquisitely produced--volume."--Eric Ormsby, New York Sun

Another Princeton book by Jerome Silbergeld:

• Body in Question: Image and Illusion in Two Chinese Films by Director Jiang Wen.

Subject Areas:

• Asian and Asian American Studies
• Art and Architecture

Distributed for the Department of Art and Archaeology, Princeton University

Shopping Cart:

For customers in the U.S., Canada, Latin America, Asia, and Australia
Paper: $29.95 ISBN13: 978-0-691-12532-9
Cloth: $58.00 ISBN13: 978-0-691-12568-8

For customers in Europe, Africa, the Middle East, and India
Paper: £20.95 ISBN13: 978-0-691-12532-9
Cloth: £39.95 ISBN13: 978-0-691-12568-8

Prices subject to change without notice

File created: 11/4/2009

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