An Analyzed Reflection of the World ─Handscroll Vol.1
| Artist | Xu Bing |
|---|---|
| Year | 1988 |
| Medium | woodcut on paper (handscroll) |
| Dimentions | 70.5×570×- |
| Country | China |
| Collection no. | 233 |
| Explanation | At first the characters printed on this hand scroll appear to be standard Chinese characters, but in fact they are characters created by the artist from a recombination of the separate elements found in standard characters. Referring to the Kangxi Dictionary, Xu developed his own rules of reconstruction, planned the form of each character, carved it into a woodblock, and then printed it in traditional text format. Over four long years, Xu created more than 4,000 characters, each completely meaningless and unusable. The sheer dizzying amount of time and effort spent might be considered a wasted effort in normal terms. However, Xu wanted to express wasted effort and the nonsensical. If he expresses as art that which normal society considers nonsense, hasn’t he in fact revealed the exasperating nature of reality, a world filled with absurdity and deception? |
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