The Seven-character Poetry Collection of Small Enterprises
2015-
Medium: Clothing label and programming writing
Dimension:Each piece 35.7 x 26.3 cm x 12
Outside packing 41 × 28.5 × 3.5 cm
Exhibition:Museum of Art Pudong, Shanghai, 2021-2022. TOKYO Gallery + BTAP, Beijing, 2021.
Since 2015, Xu Bing has collected tens of thousands of clothing brand labels from small private enterprises. These labels reflect the history of their entrepreneurship, development, bottlenecks, conversions, and acquisitions when put together. Meanwhile, we can also consider the brand name as inherited with people’s expectations and aspirations for their future. We develop a “poem writing software” particularly for this project. The computer program searches for appropriate words and sentences among fashion label tags to create a “Seven-Character Poem,” then later compiled into the collection. It is also an advancement in the creation of an “artist book.”
The genetics of reading image
2021-2022
Media: Mixed media
Dimension: 145x100x2.4cm x 8
Exhibition: Mirroring the Heart of Heaven and Earth—Ideals and Images in the Chinese Study, The Palace Museum Meridian Gate (Wu men),Beijing
One wish of mine since 2004 was to create a book that can be understood by all human beings using public signs. It’s been more than a decade since the start of this project, but it is nowhere near ending, and keeps evolving. With the age of globalization, and the now emerging globalization of “graphic expression” brought by the digital computation, new modes of expressions such as emojis and memes adored by the new generation are now making their appearances in the main exhibition hall of the Palace Museum—signs that appear to bear no association to ancient traditions. The audience might find it hard to adjust to the translation of 《兰亭集序》in emojis and memes, but the sense of alienation produces is vital to the intention of this work—to supply regular modes of thinking with a new “elements”. In this way can we better understand both our traditional and contemporary cultures.
“Wujing Cuishi” (A Room Assembling Five Classics) in today’s language means the “Library”. The ancient Chinese are experts at using images to express their comprehensions of items of complexity—looking at images is reading texts. “Shu Hua Tong Yuan”(Writing and drawing bear the same root) in my understanding is less a note on style but more an indication for semiotics. The way Chinese write the character “Shan” (mountain) is the same with which they draw a mountain. Despite the technics of signification, hieroglyphs, and coreference in modern Chinese, its hieroglyphic constituents still form the genetic core of this language. When we read the word “门” (door), we see the image of a door. If we bolt the door, adding a rod/stroke on it, then we have“闩”(latch). When we write the character “囧”(undesirable distress), aren’t we already drawing an emoji?
I often feel a sense of gratitude, to be able to witness the fact that we are still communicating in a mode as ancient as pictures and images as we step into the era of cyberpunk and the space age. It feels like time travel, living in this conjuncture, feeling that life itself is being stretched across time and space. It is not quite accurate when we say we are entering the age of image—we’ve been doing this for the past thousands of years. Today, so much of our everyday life is lived in the scope of the cellphone. It is our portable library and museum; and the first thing that occurs when we turn it on is to read the signs.
My expressive sensitivity to signs is derived from the genetics of reading images carried in my body. It is in our tradition, and it works best when activated/animated.
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Tobacco Project I: Miscellaneous Book
2000
Medium: Custom-cut "American Spirit" brand cigarattes, Chinese texts from Daodejing and Chairman Mao's words handwritten in ink, encased in hinged wooden box
Size: Case (closed): 3 1/2 x 3 7/8 in.
Exhibition: The Tobacco Project: A Series of Installations Created by Xu Bing, The Duke Homestead & Tobacco Museum, and The Perkins Library Gallery, Duke University, Durham, North Carolina,USA, 2000
Xu Bing Tobacco Project: Shanghai, Shanghai Gallery of Art, Shanghai, China, 2004
Tobacco project 3, Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Richmond, Virginia, USA, 2011
Tobacco Project I: Match Book
2000
Medium: Cardboard matches, printed with Robert Frost’s “Fire and Ice” (1920)
Size: Each: 1 5/8 x 1 3/4 in.
Exhibition: The Tobacco Project: A Series of Installations Created by Xu Bing, The Duke Homestead & Tobacco Museum, and The Perkins Library Gallery, Duke University, Durham, North Carolina,USA, 2000
Xu Bing Tobacco Project: Shanghai, Shanghai Gallery of Art, Shanghai, China, 2004
Tobacco project 3, Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Richmond, Virginia, USA, 2011
Tobacco Project I: Longing
2000
Medium: Neon, stage smoke
Size: Variable
Exhibition: The Tobacco Project: A Series of Installations Created by Xu Bing, The Duke Homestead & Tobacco Museum, and The Perkins Library Gallery, Duke University, Durham, North Carolina,USA, 2000
Tobacco Project I: Daodejing
2000
Medium: “American Spirit" brand cigarette package seals, typed with text from Lao Zi, The Book of Tao, translated by Gu Zhengkun (1995)
Size: 23 1/4 x 1 in.
Exhibition: The Tobacco Project: A Series of Installations Created by Xu Bing, The Duke Homestead & Tobacco Museum, and The Perkins Library Gallery, Duke University, Durham, North Carolina,USA, 2000
Xu Bing Tobacco Project: Shanghai, Shanghai Gallery of Art, Shanghai, China, 2004
Silkworm Book: The Analects of Confucius
Materials:Book, Silkworm.
Dimension:1.5 (H) x 52 (L) x 42 (W) cm
2020
Exhibition Location: Asia Society Triennial, New York, U.S.A.
Stone Path
2008
Materials: Carved Stone
Dimension: Varies
Location: Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden, Germany
Series
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Poem Stone Chairs
2019
Forest Project
The Forest Project is an experiment of creating a self-sustaining system that will move funds from wealthy areas to impoverished areas for planting trees. Its feasibility is based on the following principles: firstly, utilize free online services such as auction and sales hosting, money transfers, and even online teaching to achieve the lowest possible costs; secondly, benefit everyone involved in the project; thirdly, utilize regional economic discrepancies ($2.50 is a subway ride in New York, but it can plant ten trees in Kenya).
Series
Book From the Ground
2003—ongoing
Xu Bing has been undertaking his Book from the Ground project since 2003. The artist first compiled symbols drawn from the public sphere and wrote a book using only these signs. The book is written in a way that any reader, regardless of his or her cultural or educational background, can understand. As long as one lives within the contemporary society, he or she will be able to interpret the book. Due to the universality of its visual language, it could be published anywhere without translation. For the Book from the Ground installation, Xu Bing recreated his studio's working environment and brought some materials to the exhibition space, implying that this is a never-ending project in progress. Xu Bing’s studio also made a character database software that corresponds to the language of the book. Users can enter words either in English or in Chinese, and the program will translate them into Xu Bing's lexicon of signs. It thus serves as an intermediary form of communication and exchange between the two languages. As personal computer and the internet become increasingly integrated into daily life, the lexicon of digital icons grows accordingly, and the symbolic language of Book from the Ground has been further updated, augmented, and complicated. In response to his own Book from the Sky, a work dated 30 years earlier whose language is illegible to anyone, Book from the Ground is legible to all. It is an expression of Xu Bing’s long-standing vision of a universal language.
Book From the Ground: From Point to Point can be purchased from various bookstores and websites.
Series
Living Word
2001
Materials: Cut and painted acrylic
Location: Arthur M. Sackler Gallery, Smithsonian Institution, Washington D.C., USA
The work is mainly comprised of over 400 calligraphic variants of the Chinese character “niao”, meaning bird, carved in colored acrylic and laid out in a shimmering track that rises from the floor into the air. On the gallery floor Chinese characters in the “simplified style” script popularized during the Mao era are used to write out the dictionary definition for niao. The bird/niao characters then break away from the confines of the literal definition and take flight through the installation space. As they rise into the air, the characters “de-evolve” from the simplified system to standardized Chinese text and finally to the ancient Chinese pictograph hasde upon a bird’s actual appearance. At the uppermost point of the installation, a flock of these ancient characters, in form of both bird and word, soar high into the rafters toward the upper windows of the space, as though attempting to break free of the words with which humans attempt to categorize and define them.
The colorful, shimmering imagery of the installation imparts a magical, fairy-tale like quality. Yet the overt simplicity, charm and ready comprehensibility of the work has the underlying effect of guiding the audience to open up the “cognitive space” of their minds to the implications of, and relationships between, word, concept, symbol and image.
Series
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Living Word
2021-2022 -
Living Word 3
2011
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Living Word 2
2002
Book from the Sky
1987-1991
Medium: Mixed media installation/ hand-printed books and scrolls printed from blocks inscribed with ''false'' characters
This four-volume treatise, produced over four years, was made with thousands of meaningless characters that look like Chinese, each designed by the artist in a Song-style font that was standardized by artisans in the Ming dynasty. For the immersive installation, the artist hard-carved over four thousand moveable type printing blocks. The meticulous, exhaustive production process and the work’s format, arrayed like ancient Chinese classics, were such that audiences could not believe that these exquisite texts were completely illegible. The work simultaneously invites and denies the viewer’s desire to read the work.
As Xu Bing has noted, the false characters “seem to upset intellectuals,” inspiring doubt in received systems of knowledge. Many early viewers pored over the artwork, obsessively looking for real characters.
Square Word Calligraphy
For Square Word Calligraphy, Xu Bing designs a calligraphic system in which English words come to resemble Chinese characters. Like a linguistic breeder, the artist combines Chinese calligraphy with English writing to create a new “species.” However, it is different from the nonsense characters in Book From the Sky, which give the viewer a feeling of hesitation, suspicion, and confusion. When reading Square Word Calligraphy, such feeling is joyfully resolved with the sudden revelation that the work does contain “real” text. Thereby into the Western cultural sphere was written a brand new, Eastern art form. Established notions of Chinese and English no longer retain, and perceptual norms are reset, marking the new potentials that challenge the foundation of cognition itself.
After developing this lettering system, Xu Bing created a new installation piece modeled on adult literacy classes within the exhibition space. He also added a textbook, an instructional video, and a practice sheet just like those used in classroom settings. When the audience goes into the gallery, it is as if he or she enters a study space.
Series
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The Grand Canal
2019 -
Magic Carpet
2006 -
Your Surname Please
1998
Square Word Calligraphy Classroom
1994-1996
Materials: Mixed-media installation; instructional video, model books, copybooks, ink, brushes, brush stands, blackboard
The intention of this installation is to simulate a classroom-like setting modeled on adult literacy classes, in a gallery or museum space. Desks are arranged with small containers of ink, brushes and a copybook with instructions on the basic principles of ''New English Calligraphy,'' a writing system invented and designed by the artist. A video titled ''Elementary Square Word Calligraphy Instruction,' is played on a monitor in the exhibition space, capturing the audiences' attention and inviting them to participate in the class. Once they are seated at the desks, the audience is instructed to take up their brushes and the lesson in New English Calligraphy begins.
Essentially, New English Calligraphy is a fusion of written English and written Chinese. The letters of an English word are slightly altered and arranged in a square word format so that the word takes on the ostensible form of a Chinese character, yet remains legible to the English reader. As people attempt to recognize and write these words, some of the thinking patterns that have been ingrained in them since they learned to read are challenged. It is the artist's belief that people must have their routine thinking attacked in this way. While undergoing this process of estrangement and re-familiarization with one's written language, the audience is reminded that the sensation of distance between other systems of language and one's own is largely self-induced.
The Character of Characters
2012: 17'
2012, 2015: 15'
Materials: seventeen-minute animated film
This animation is conceived as a study and imagination of a calligraphy masterpiece by Zhao Mengfu (1254-1322) in the collection of Yahoo’s founder, Mr. Zhiyuan Yang. Through the medium of widescreen animation, The Character of Characters describes the source of the unique character of Chinese people. Everyone in China who has received basic education must, over the course of years, commit to memorize and then write and re-write thousands of characters, each character a drawing. This is the way things have been done over thousands of years in the Chinese history, so this must have had some influence on the formation of the character of Chinese people. It implies the way that Chinese people see and approach things, and why China is the way it is today – developing at this breakneck speed but not in line with the Western value system.
Chinese people’s worldviews and concepts of freedom; the consequences of Chinese people’s flexibility, collectivism, face-saving mentality, moral stance that demands focus on communal interests, and worship of symbols and big names; the ability of Chinese culture to digest other cultures, and the Chinese culture of copying (“shanzhai”). All of these special characteristics could be said to have a deep connection to the Chinese way of writing characters. This animation seeks to reveal the relation between Chinese writing and cultural characteristics, the core and energy of Chinese culture, and its advantages and disadvantages for people to continue to build new modes of human civilization.
Supported by The Robert H. N. Ho Family Foundation.
Mustard Seed Garden Landscape Scroll
2010
Materials: Woodblock print mounted as a handscroll, ink on paper
"I created this work upon an invitation from Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. By cutting, reorganizing, and printing motifs from the Mustard Seed Garden Manual of Painting (1679), I created a handscroll version of the classic manual. I believe that a core characteristic of Chinese painting is its schematized nature, which is reflected in classic literature, theatrical expression, and various methods of social production. The Mustard Seed Garden Manual of Painting is a dictionary of signs for representing the myriad things of the world. Through The Mustard Seed Garden Landscape Scroll, I attempt to investigate and reveal the relation between the Chinese way of thinking and the semiotic and schematized nature of Chinese culture."
-- Xu Bing, 2010
Landscript
Landscript, as the title suggests, is “pictures” that Xu Bing intentionally made with “script.” This project started when the artist went to the Himalayas in Nepal in 1999 and sketched “scenes” with Chinese characters. China has long had a tradition that “calligraphy and painting have the same origins.” Xu Bing’s Landscript, landscape-in-script, transformed the visual images of landscapes to linguistic forms, inviting the viewer to reassess the particularity of Chinese culture hidden in landscape paintings and providing a unique way to “read a scene.”
Series
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The Suzhou Landscripts
2003-2013 -
Landscript: Sydney
2003 -
Reading Landscape
2001
Art for the People
1999
Materials: Mixed media installation;
Dimension: 36 x 9 ft (1097.3 x 273.4 cm)
Location: Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1999; Victoria and Albert Musum, London, 2001
Commissioned by the Museum of Modern Art in New York, this work was created for the Museum's ''Project Series,'' a group of monumental banners designed by international artists to be displayed outside the entrance to the museum. Xu emblazoned his eye-catching red-and-yellow banner, measuring 36ft x 9ft, with the slogan ''ART FOR THE PEOPLE: Chairman Mao said'' inscribed in his own invented system of ''Square Word Calligraphy'' -- English words deconstructed but then re-configured into forms that mimic the square structure of Chinese characters. With its prominent display above the museum entrance, the banner and its slogan served both as a motto for the museum and as a public airing of one of Mao Zedong's most fundamental views on art. Reflective also of the artist's personal conviction that Mao's concept of art for the people is universally relevant; the work exemplifies the way in which Xu integrates his particular cultural background and life experience into the international context of contemporary art.
The Glassy Surface of a Lake
Medium: mixed media installation/ cast aluminum
...The towering new creation that cascades from the top of the Elvehjem's Paige Court is a celebration rather than a memorial. "The Glassy Surface of a Lake" (formerly titled "Net") is inspired by a passage in Henry David Thoreau's "Walden," a meditation on the profound purity of an utterly still lake. In the passage, the famous naturalist writer inverts his viewpoint to envision the lake hovering overhead so "you could walk right under it to the opposite hills."
Xu has re-created that vision in the museum: the suspended lake takes the form of the very letters of Thoreau's passage. Thousands of wire-linked aluminum letters hover at the top of the three-story museum court and, in the middle of the "lake," letters tumble down to the first floor. As we gaze up this shaft of metaphorical liquid, what are we meant to see?
In his fresh perspective on the lake, Thoreau envisions the lake as no less than "Earth's eye; looking into which the beholder measures the depth of his own nature." Do we see ourselves mirrored in those watery depths? Can each of us measure our nature in this mirror of nature?
For sure, mirroring definitions of the same word ("nature") reflect the play of words and life - and the urgent need to protect both from poisoning rhetoric. If the thousands of wired-together letters lack the elegance of a still lake, Xu, the Elvehjem staff (and UW-Madison students) have nevertheless produced a marvelous confabulation.
-- Kevin Lynch, ''Xu Bing and The Power of Words.'' The Capital Times, 10 Sept, 2004.
Bird Language
2003
Materials: Metal cages, motion sensors, fake birds
Location: Beijing, China
Excuse Me Sir,Can You Tell Me the Way to Asia Society?
2001
Medium: Mixed media installation/ computer monitors
Location: Asia Society, New York, USA
Commissioned as a permanent installation by the Asia Society, New York, this work consists of a series of four flat computer monitors of diminishing size mounted sequentially on a wall at Asia Society headquarters. Words rendered in Xu's invented ''English Square Word Calligraphy'' appear first on the largest monitor. The characters then begin to break apart and move across the first screen, disappearing and then reappearing on the second and third screens in a continuous motion. Arriving at the last screen, the characters reassemble into ordinary English script, revealing a text-book conversation beginning with the phrase ''Excuse me sir, can you tell me how to get to the Asia Society?''
Evoking the phraseology of an elementary English-as-a-second language textbook, Xu's text points to the commonality of experience of new immigrants to the United States. Since the viewers standing in front of Xu's installation are in fact already at the Asia Society, this request for directions implies the deeper existential question of ''Where are we, in reality?'' Experienced within the specific environs of the so-called ''Asia Society New York,'' Xu's work plays with the concept ''I am within you, you are within me'' - the same concept explored in his ''English Square Word Calligraphy.'
Body Outside of Body
Materials: printed post-its.
This work was created for an exhibition at the Ginza Graphic Gallery in Japan examining the dynamic changes taking place in the book industry in the countries that use Chinese characters in their language systems - Japan, Korea, and China. Xu's work focuses on the idea of language and digitalization. The title of the work is derived from a passage in the classic 15th century Chinese novel Journey to the West, in which the supernatural Monkey, Sun Wukong, does battle with a demon and finds himself losing. Using the magical method of ''shen wai shen'' (which in modern terms could roughly be translated as self-cloning) Monkey takes a strand of his own hair and puts it in his mouth, thereby releasing thousands of miniature replicas of himself that do battle with and defeat the demon.
Using Chinese, Japanese and Korean, respectively, to write out this passage from the tale, the artist displayed the three versions on separate panels mounted on the wall, with each character inscribed on its own small, square notebook. Audience members were invited to freely tear off sheets of characters, unexpectedly revealing underneath a word written in a different language. This random mixing resulted in a scrambling of languages within one narrative, like different texts jumbled together in a computer error, or the cacophony resulting from different languages being spoken at once. At other times the random mixing of words regained a kind of normalcy and coherence.
On the back of each sheet of paper was inscribed Xu Bing's personal website address: http://www.xubing.com. One implication of the work is the notion that through Internet technology one can attain something of the magical capacity for self-generation displayed in the story.
Lost Letters
1997
Medium: Mixed media installation/ prints of a factory floor on its wall, old printing press.
The site of Berlin’s Asian Fine Art Factory was once used in the early 20th century by the German Communist party as an underground publishing house and gathering place. It was later requisitioned by the Nazis as a holding area for deportees. Type blocks, still embedded in its gallery floors, are here used as the medium of Xu Bing’s Lost Letters. Because these rooms once housed printers, Xu Bing was interested in the historicity of the floors, in how the images they contain might once more be transferred onto paper. The artist used newspaper-sized sheaves of paper to make rubbings of these imprints. These papers were mounted alongside a vintage printing press fitted with intentionally inverted metal type plates, to mimic the effect of the floor prints. The work reflects Xu’s interest in history as palimpsest, its different “versions” overlaying each another, waiting to be discovered.
Telephone
1996-2006
Medium: Multiple languages translation
This project experiments with the potential and extent of transference between different languages. Approach: the project begins with the translation of a page of Chinese text into English; the English text is translated into French, from French into Russian, and then, following this method, through German, Spanish, Japanese, and Thai. Finally, it is translated back into Chinese. A comparison of the first and last Chinese versions reveals the extent of the disparity between the two. As of the writing of this introduction, the chain translation project is still in mid-process (right now it is being converted from Spanish to Japanese), but how will it end? I myself do not know. Perhaps it will be a complete perversion of the original, perhaps it won’t be that awful (which would be better, for this would show that translations, upon which we have relied for many years, are still fundamentally trustworthy).
The project began ten years ago with New York curator Octavio Zaya, but it never got off the ground. One day Ocatavia unexpectedly caught wind of another artist who was undertaking a similar project, and I could only agree to stop (even though second hand information is unreliable). Yet, for the last ten years, I have searched the web and made every possible inquiry, but have never seen mention of this project. And my thoughts often turn to this “pitiful” plan.
Later, I realized that an American game called “telephone” is played just this way. You whisper a sentence to me, I whisper it to my neighbor, and then it finally returns to the last person in the chain who reveals how the original statement has changed(I imagine a similar sort of game exists in China as well). The game, which has been handed down from children, is simple to the extent that it mirrors real life, yet it is imbued with philosophical undertones. This species of game is also used in American universities and research institutions: for instance, in management communication classes. Students are divided into two groups and given the same appliance. One group starts the process of constructing the appliance as it transmits each section of the instructions to the other group. The results of the groups can be entirely dissimilar. This experiment examines the degree of error between direct and transmitted communication. It discusses how managers can effectively transmit directions. The skill of translating is also a skill of transmitting.
The original Chinese text was selected from Columbia Professor Lydia H. Liu’s book “Cross-writing: Critical Perspectives on Narratives of Modern Intellectual History.” I had wanted to find a passage which like many…… But I discovered that her style is clear and simple, and it was difficult to find a passage that can easily be misunderstood. But it is only by starting from normal prose that the reliability of this experiment can be proven.
Thank you Lydia, and also a big thanks to the translators around the world who warmly participated in this project.
-- Xu Bing 25 April, 2006, New York
Brailliterate
1993
Medium: Mixed media installation/ Braille books and book covers
This work, the title of which combines the words Braille and illiterate, is comprised of a reading room with a table piled with books. The covers of these books, altered by the artist, feature English titles superimposed over original Braille titles. The English titles are in fact completely different from the Braille ones, and bear no relation to the actual content of the books. Upon opening the books, a sighted member of the audience expecting to find an English text inside finds only pages printed in Braille, the content of which he/she assumes to be that indicated by the English title. Conversely, a blind audience member literate in Braille, unaware of the misleading English title printed on the book, would be unaware that sighted readers had a completely wrong impression of the book's content. The result is that the same object is interpreted by different viewers in completely different ways. Only those both in full capacity of their vision and educated in Braille would be able to comprehend the deception. In this way Brailleliterate evokes issues of cultural bias, misinterpretation and concealment.
Post Testament
1992-1993
Medium: Installation of printed and bound books with religious and secular texts
Dimension: varies; 35 × 45 × 8cm each book (closed)
This installation is comprised of 300 specially printed and bound volumes titled “Post Testament.” The content of the books is a strange, hybrid text. The King James’ version of the New Testament was combined with a trashy contemporary novel by alternating each word of the two texts. As a result, the only way to read the complete text taken from either book is to skip every other word. Yet, regardless of which narrative the reader is focused on, the visual presence of the other narrative cannot be avoided, creating a visual imprint on the reader’s mind. The hybrid text thus generates a new and abnormal reading pattern. The artist attempts to experiment with the relation between avant-garde literature and visual art.
A, B, C...
1991
Materials: Unglazed terracotta installation/woodblock
The theme of this work is the awkwardness encountered in linguistic exchange between different cultures. It is comprised of thirty-eight ceramic cubes that represent a sort of transliteration from the twenty-six letters of the Roman alphabet to Chinese characters. The characters that have been chosen are such that, when pronounced, render sounds equivalent to the Roman letter they represent. The Chinese characters are carved on the upper face of each ceramic block in the form of a printer's stamp and the Roman letter is printed on the side of the block. 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 need two or three Chinese characters to 'transliterate.' For example, 'W' is rendered 'da', 'bu,' 'liu,' which mean big, cloth and six, respectively. This activity may begin with a becoming logic, but ultimately it leaves its subject, transliterated language, virtually meaningless and almost ridiculous.