Chinglais : l’art de Xu Bing
Towards the end of the 1980s, Xu Bing worked for five years, manipulating more than 4000 Chinese characters, adding or removing some of their appendages to relieve them of their comprehensible idiosyncrasies as signs of the Chinese language. He thus created what he called the “Tianshu”, the book (sh...
Enregistré dans:
| Udgivet i: | URI:https://journals.openedition.org/transtexts, |
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| Hovedforfatter: | |
| Format: | Article ou chapitre numérique |
| Sprog: | Français |
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Transtext(e)s Transcultures
2009
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| Online adgang: | Accès Université d'Orléans et IFPM Accès Université d'Orléans et IFPM |
| Summary: | Towards the end of the 1980s, Xu Bing worked for five years, manipulating more than 4000 Chinese characters, adding or removing some of their appendages to relieve them of their comprehensible idiosyncrasies as signs of the Chinese language. He thus created what he called the “Tianshu”, the book (shu) of the sky (tian). This work compels us to rethink the properties of language. The Tianshu is not merely the artistic project of an eccentric, it is a vision of language infused with politics. Xu Bing created a paradox: a complex and diverse semiotics directed against the idea of usefulness to the community. He created a negation of language. From its lack of meaning, the Tianshu thus produces the same affective reaction as to a language we do not know, or to a dead language – extinct with its last speakers. It denies reality. Through the Tianshu and the rest of his work, Xu Bing does not intend to kill language but rather conceive a language beyond human authority. |
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