Returned to lender The Met accepts temporary loans of art both for short-term exhibitions and for long-term display in its galleries.
The Character of Characters
Xu Bing Chinese
Not on view
徐冰 汉字的性格 水墨動畫
Throughout his career, Xu Bing has grappled with the power of the written word. His iconic installation Book from the Sky (1987–91) surrounds the viewer with thousands of Chinese characters that, upon closer examination, are invented nonsense words. He followed that with Square Word Calligraphy (1994), a system for writing English that looks like brush-written Chinese; for readers of English, Square Word Calligraphy inverts Book from the Sky, providing a breakthrough to meaning where none was apparent at first. In this new work, created specifically for “Out of Character,” Xu continues to engage with the written Chinese word, providing a sprawling and thoughtful meditation on the development of Chinese characters and their systematization as calligraphy. For this video, Xu created over 1,000 individual sketches, which were blended digitally to generate this animation.
