1987－1991

Medium: Mixed media installation/ hand-printed books and scrolls printed from blocks inscribed with ''false'' characters

Produced over the course of four years, this four-volume treatise features thousands of meaningless characters resembling Chinese. Each character was meticulously designed by the artist in a Song-style font that was standardized by artisans in the Ming dynasty. In this immersive installation, the artist hand-carved over four thousand moveable type printing blocks. The painstaking production process and the format of the work, arrayed like ancient Chinese classics, were such that the audience could not believe that these exquisite texts were completely illegible. The work simultaneously entices and denies the viewer’s desire to read the work.

As Xu Bing has noted, the false characters “seem to upset intellectuals,” provoking doubt in established systems of knowledge. Many early viewers would spend considerable time scrutinizing the texts, fixedly searching for genuine characters amidst the illegible ones.

1990－1991

Medium: Mixed media installation/ ink rubbings on paper with stones and soil

Dimensions: Central part approx. 31 (L) x 6 (W) m; Side part approx. 13 (H) x 14 (W) m each

In 1990, Xu Bing decided to realize his longstanding vision: to create rubbings of a monumental natural object. It was during this time that he concieved the notio that any textured object could be transferred onto a two-dimensional surface as a print. After much preparation, in May, Xu Bing, friends, students, and local residents set off for the Jinshanling section of the Great Wall. They dedicated slightly less than a month making rubbings of three sides of a beacon tower and a portion of the wall itself. This was the last major artwork that the artist started before reloacting to the United States later that year. The artwork was subsequently exhibited for the first time in the United States, where Xu Bing noted that "Those American printers were shocked by the piece's size." The fact that the work emerged during a period of transition gives it an additional layer of meaning to its significance. 

The title Ghost Pounding the Wall is translated from the Chinese aphorism “Gui Da Qiang,” which can be interpreted as “a wall built by ghosts.” This phrase carries the meaning to be stuck in one’s own thinking, refering to a story of a man trapped behind walls built by ghosts. Viewers of Book from the Sky used this epithet to express their inability to comprehend the work. Xu Bing embraced his criticism and appropriated it as the title for his new work—employing a clever play on words where the term “build” can also mean “pound” in Chinese.  

1991

Materials: Unglazed terracotta installation/woodblock

The theme of Xu Bing’s artwork A, B, C… is centered around the awkwardness and limitations inherent to cross-cultural communication. It consists of thirty-eight ceramic cubes, each representing a sort of transliteration from the twenty-six letters of the Roman alphabet to Chinese characters. The chosen characters are selected based on their pronunciation, creating sounds equivalent to the corresponding Roman letters that they represent. 

The Chinese characters are carved on the top face of each ceramic block in the form of a printer's stamp, while the Roman letter is printed on the side. For example, the English letter “A” is rendered by the Chinese “ai,” which means sadness. “B” is rendered “bi,” which means land on the other side, on the other shore. Some letters require two or three Chinese characters to transliterate. For example, “W” is rendered “da,” “bu,” “liu,” which mean big, cloth, and six, respectively. This activity begins with a logical pattern, but ultimately deviates from its intended meaning. Due to the loss of the original context and semantic connections, the resulting transliteral language increasingly appears meaningless and absurd.