Chapter 1
L anguage I de ol o g i e s
in the Text- base d A rt
of Xu Bi ng
Implications for language policy and planning
Adam Jaworski
Contemporary art has been a site of intense linguistic production for several decades.
Visual artists have been experimenting with new ways of displaying or enframing language, employing transformative processes and forms of symbolic manipulation that
frequently contest or subvert dominant language ideologies. In this way, artists produce new ‘regimes of language’ (or “regimes of discourse”, Pennycook, 2002, p. 92) that
regulate or unsettle “moral and political visions that shape attitudes and behaviour”
(Tollefson, 2011, p. 370).
When artists use language as a medium in their practice, their works enter a broader
sociolinguistic ield, whereby linguistic forms carry social values of distinctiveness and
possibility as deined by participants’ (artists’ own, audiences’ and critics’) assumptions,
perceptions and interpretations, or – in other words – their language ideologies (Irvine,
2001). Irvine refers to language ideologies as “ideational schemes, whether about language or other things [that] have some relationship with point of view… and the viewer’s
baggage of history and partiality” (Irvine, 2001, p. 24). But displays, or performances, of
language in the form of art installations, especially on a vast scale, as is the case of some
examples to be considered below, are not merely manifestations of the artist’s ideologies
of language. hey are instances of historically consequential (Silverstein, 2001) language
ideological debates that “develop against a wider sociopolitical and historical horizon
of relationships of power, forms of discrimination, social engineering, nation-building,
and so forth” (Blommaert, 1999, p. 2).
All the linguistic choices we make and the publics (Gal & Woolard, 2001) we ‘project’ them onto result from some planning eforts, more or less conscious, individual or
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Language ideologies in the text-based art of Xu Bing
institutional. Woolard and Schielin (1994) suggest that all language policy and planning decisions are underpinned by speciic language ideologies. Bolander goes as far as
to consider “language policy as ideology” (2017, p. 262; original emphasis), in contrast
to the view of “language policy as discourse” (Barakos, 2012, p. 169; see also Tollefson,
1991). Likewise, Lo Bianco (2004, p. 750) argues that “[i]n the absence of overt or explicit
detailed planning […] ideology operates as ‘default’ policy”.
Naturally, debates about language ideologies take the form of discourses and metadiscourses and they also presuppose, shape and reshape language ideologies according
to social actors’ dominant regimes of representation (Blommaert, 1999). his is again
echoed by Bolander (2017, pp. 261–262), who, building on Pennycook (2014, p. 2), argues
“that it is not so much language as language ideology that is the object of language
policy”. Furthermore, any public display of language, or so-called linguistic landscape,
can be considered as a tool of and an arena for the implementation of speciic language
policies (Shohamy, 2006). Executing text-based works requires visual artists to make
choices akin to the linguistic planning and policy decisions to be found in other areas of
linguistic landscapes with regard to the selection of linguistic codes, genres, visual styling, emplacement, and so on.
hus, language policy and planning cannot be separated from social actors’ language
ideologies situated within the chains of broader language ideological debates. In the
context of the present discussion, I focus on the ield of artistic production as a site of
sociolinguistic activity to underscore the role of individual agency in language policy,
planning and the execution or shaping of linguistic texts. In this sense, I follow Ricento’s
(2000) critical and postmodern perspective on language policy and planning, in which
the notion of agency is understood as individual and group processes of language use,
attitudes and any overt policy decisions. Speciically, Ricento (2000, p. 208) poses the
following question: “Why do individuals opt to use (or cease to use) particular language varieties for speciic functions in diferent domains, and how do those choices
inluence – and how are they inluenced by – institutional language policy-making
(local to national and supranational)?”. In response to Ricento’s enquiry, Lane (2015),
for example, demonstrates how eforts to standardize a minority language (in this case,
Kven, a Finnic minority language in northern Norway) can lead to diferent reactions
from its speakers, from embracing the idea of standardization by ‘ixing’ its written version to resisting such standardization of Kven by considering it a ‘broken’ language. In
a radically diferent context, Roth-Gordon (2009) demonstrates how in Rio de Janeiro,
Brazil, gíria, a favela (shantytown) slang, has come to be enregistered (Agha, 2003) in
the 1990s alongside the Portuguese national standard. Confronted with violence from
both the military police and drug gangs, the option of using, or disavowing, one register or the other, allows individual speakers to navigate Brazil’s regime of “diferentiated
citizenship” by strategically indexing diferent personas, places and allegiances, and
constructing newly vulnerable and newly marginalized city residents. Finally, Moriarty
and Pietikäinen (2011) discuss two examples of individual, ad hoc language planning
initiatives in the context of language revitalization and normalization: an Americanborn, long-term Irish resident performing stand-up comedy in his newly acquired
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Irish, and a Finnish–Sámi bilingual rapper performing his rap lyrics in Inari Sámi. he
authors cite evidence of both artists receiving much exposure in their national communities through mainstream and online media and contributing to fresh perceptions of
the two endangered, minority languages as ‘modern’ (or ‘cool’) and appealing to young
people.
Woolard and Schiefelin (1994) observe that the locus of language ideologies has
been identiied in language use as well as in metalinguistic discourse. Both these sites
of linguistic ideology, which are also the ‘tools’ of any language policy, are explored here
through the examination of several works of text-based art by the artist Xu Bing (‘language use’)1, as well as the artists’ own and various commentators’ interpretations of his
works (‘metalinguistic discourse’). Collectively, they demonstrate how the ield of artistic production and criticism contribute to language ideological debates about Chinese
– in particular about Chinese writing – and the nature of language more broadly.
In the following section I discuss briely some aspects of Xu Bing’s biography and
artistic practice, speciically related to his use of language. Next, I discuss his diverse language ideological positions underpinning four of his major works. I conclude by ofering some relections on what students of language policy and planning might learn from
extending the scope of their interest to text-based art.
Xu Bing and the Origins of His
‘Language Art’ Practice
My key point of reference in this chapter is the contemporary conceptual artist Xu Bing.
Xu Bing was born in 1955 in Chongqing (Sichuan Province, China) and brought up in
Beijing, where his father was Professor of History and his mother a member of staf in
the Department of Library Science, both at Beijing University. his environment provided Xu Bing with access to and interest in books. Although as a child he was unable to
read them, he enjoyed their appearance on the rows of shelving, their texture, and the
smell of paper and ink. His father encouraged and provided instruction in Xu Bing’s
study of calligraphy. As early as 1969 and 1970, during his time in middle school, Xu Bing
developed a keen interest in typography, layout and the visuality of writing more generally. He collected newspaper fonts and planned at some point to compile a “handbook of
artistic lettering” (Erickson, 2001, p. 34).
Before Xu Bing graduated with a master’s degree in printmaking from the Central
Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing in 1987, his perspective on language was inluenced
greatly by his experience of the Cultural Revolution (1966–1976). For Xu the most signiicant shit in the Cultural Revolution was the use of language as an instrument of
propaganda, which had a direct impact on his family: “At the time there was a saying:
‘Use your pen as a weapon and shoot down reactionary gangs.’ My father was a reactionary” (Xu Bing, 2001, p. 16). In one interview, Xu Bing recounts an early memory of a
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Language ideologies in the text-based art of Xu Bing
particularly dramatic encounter with big character posters, when he saw the name of his
father, Xu Huamin, written in huge letters on a poster that proclaimed ‘Down with Xu
Huamin’ (Erickson, 2001, p. 34).
In 1974, as a well-educated young man, Xu Bing was sent for three years of re-education to the tiny village of Shouliang Gou in Yanqing county, some 80 kilometers northwest of Beijing. During these years, despite the tedium of peasant work and poor living
conditions, Xu Bing drew and painted portraits and landscapes, designed notices for
Chinese New Year celebrations, weddings and funerals, and pursued the study of typography in his work for the mimeographed revolutionary periodical Brilliant Mountain
Flowers. During this period, Xu Bing honed his skills as a draughtsman, calligrapher and
typographer, and, on his rare visits home, he beneitted from attending art exhibitions
and occasional instruction from the husband of one of his mother’s colleagues, the oil
painter Li Zongijn (1916–1977). Aspects of his artistic practice were inluenced by some
of the literacy (and illiteracy) practices in the countryside. For example, he observed
how some of the elders who struggled with writing and reading would locate characters
from ritual texts in scraps of print and copy the characters on to white cloth, and he
“marvelled at the writing he saw painted on furniture, where auspicious phrases of four
characters were arranged overlaying each other as a single character” (Vainker, 2013, p.
14). Ultimately, although he considered the Cultural Revolution “an historically unprecedented experiment” that “resulted in disaster” (Xu Bing, 2011, p. 51), his experience of
living among the peasants of Shouliang Gou turned him into an artist “with a socialist
background” (ibid., p. 52) following Mao Zedong’s (1893–1976) admonition to create “art
for the people”.
Xu Bing’s early life was marked by a growing “mistrust of language” (Erickson, 2001).
When he was very young, he was unable to read the books in his mother’s library; when
he was old enough to read them, he was not allowed to do so. Soon ater he learnt to
write and mastered traditional calligraphy, the government introduced the policy
of simplifying Chinese characters to foster widespread literacy2. Once the grip of the
Cultural Revolution began to loosen, Xu Bing started reading voraciously the books
he had been forbidden to access in previous years and joined in countless intellectual
debates. He felt overloaded by this new barrage of words, which he likened to a state of
chaos: “I felt the discomfort of a person sufering from starvation who had just gorged
himself. It was at this point that I considered creating a book of my own that might
mirror my feelings” (Book from the Sky, see below) (Xu Bing, 2001, p. 14). Finally, at the
age of thirty-ive, he emigrated to the United States, where he was confronted with a
new linguistic environment that required him to learn yet another way of speaking and
writing. he resulting conlict between his actual level of knowledge and his ability to
express that knowledge found expression in his later work (Square Word Calligraphy,
see below) (ibid.).
Yet, the sources of Xu Bing’s thematization of language, writing and calligraphy in
his work must be put into a broader perspective reaching beyond his personal experience of early calligraphy education, training in printmaking or typographic services
for a revolutionary journal. Chinese communism, which Xu experienced since his early
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5
life, was as much a social as a national ideology, aiming at the restoration of the splendour of a great empire and civilization in combination with Western-like modernization (Hobsbawm, 1994). As in other nation-building projects, the establishment and
promotion of a national language, including a writing reform, in China was considered
a necessary condition for the unity and modernization of the country from the beginning of the proletarian revolution in the irst half of the twentieth century (Chen, 1999),
a sentiment shared quite some time earlier by nineteenth century Protestant missionaries in China (Hutton, 2008b). In this respect, Chinese communist leaders adhered to the
Herderian Romantic ideology of “the complex anchoring of language in national character, history, and society” (Bauman & Briggs, 2003, p. 170). Even if the enregisterment
of Putonghua (Dong, 2010) as a national standard did not invoke Herderian references
to national literature and literary language as capable of capturing the “national characteristics” of its people (Hutton, 2006, p. 85), the discourse of a shared language has
always gone hand-in-hand with the discourse of Chinese nationalism, something that
Xu has always been keenly aware of:
Mao’s transformation of culture was meant to ‘touch people to their very souls.’ Most
deeply rooted was his transformation of language, because the Chinese language
directly inluences the methods of thinking and understanding of all Chinese people. To strike at the written word is to strike at the very essence of the culture. Any
doctoring of the written word becomes in itself a transformation of the most inherent portion of a person’s thinking. My experience with the written word has allowed
me to understand this. (Xu Bing, 2001, pp. 13–14; added emphasis).
In this quote, Xu Bing echoes Herder’s (and Mao’s) position that for a nation (Volk) the
“wealth of views on tradition, history, religion, and principles of life reside[s] in language, all of the people’s heart and soul” (Herder, 1793; cited in Votruba, n.d.).
he next section explores how Xu Bing variably orients to the national language ideology in four diferent works/projects. Speciically, I will argue that the national language
ideology is upheld and re-inscribed in his video animation, he Character of Characters,
subverted in the installation Book from the Sky, inverted in the project Square Word
Calligraphy, and transcended in the project Book from the Ground.
The Works
he four examples of Xu Bing’s work to be considered in this section are derived from
the following projects: he Character of Characters (2012) – an animated video themed
around the history of Chinese writing and China (Figures 1–4); Book from the Sky
(Tianshu) (1987–1991) – an installation featuring books and scrolls printed with ‘false’
Chinese characters (Figures 5–6); Square Word Calligraphy – (1994–) an ongoing project
of writing (predominantly) English texts in a stylized Chinese script (Figures 7–9); and
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Language ideologies in the text-based art of Xu Bing
Book from the Ground (Dishu) (2003–) – a multimedia project and novel ‘written’ with
visual symbols and icons drawn from ‘everyday’ visual culture (Figure 10).
he Character of Characters (2012) – Re-inscribing
National Language Ideology
In his video he Character of Characters (2012), Xu Bing tells the story of China through
the story of the Chinese language, speciically its writing system and the art of calligraphy. he seventeen-minute animation presented on a large, eleven-metre wide screen
resembles an unfolding of a traditional Chinese scroll. It is premised on the idea that
calligraphy has given rise to “the essential diference between Eastern and Western ways
of thinking, which allows viewers to understand the Chinese national character, today’s
China, and the possibility of China’s future through the Chinese writing system” (Xu
Bing, 2012a, p. 60). A close link between the national language and the character of the
nation is also invoked in the following quote, which explains the main ‘thesis’ of the
video:
My intention in this animated ilm is to set forth my views on the origins of the
Chinese people and their distinctive qualities – respect for tradition and ceremony,
ability to bear hardship without complaint, irmness cloaked in gentleness, and ability to change with the circumstances – by means of analyzing, examining, and reimaging a handscroll by Zhao Mengfu now in the Guanyuan shanzhuang collection…
Ater watching the entire ilm, one will in fact come to understand the content of a ‘thesis’ on calligraphy and the distinctive qualities of the Chinese people. (Xu Bing, 2012a, p.
27; added emphasis)
Xu Bing’s story begins with the primordial irst line, irst brushstroke, embodied in the
Chinese numeral one “一” (Figure 1). Its multiplications, permutations and combinations give rise to a rich and complex writing system consisting of thousands of characters (Figure 2). Xu Bing locates the essence of Chinese writing, and implicitly of the
entire Chinese culture, in the power of a single brushstroke.
Just as legitimizing claims to nationhood and to nation-states’ bounded territories
are typically located in the distant, indeed timeless, mystery-shrouded past (Anderson,
1983; Hobsbawm, 1990), the beginning of Xu Bing’s history of Chinese writing is
grounded in the legend of the mythical, four-eyed igure Cang Jie, whose extraordinary
Figure 1. Still image from Xu Bing, he Character of Characters (2012; sound and color; 16’45’’);
“一” ; approx. 00’57’’. ©Xu Bing Studio.
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Figure 2. Still image from Xu Bing, he Character of Characters (2012; sound and color; 16’45’’);
All characters; approx. 01’02’’. Detail of the letmost part of the image enlarged below. ©Xu Bing
Studio.
Figure 3. Still image from Xu Bing, he Character of Characters (2012; sound and color; 16’45’’);
Landscape with Myna Bird and Human Figure; approx. 02’21’’. ©Xu Bing Studio.
Figure 4. Still image from Xu Bing, he Character of Characters (2012; sound and color; 16’45’’);
History of character reforms; approx. 11’57’’. ©Xu Bing Studio.
seeing powers allowed him to invent writing by observing patterns in nature. Cang Jie’s
written characters come to life as transformed patterns on turtle shells, bird feathers,
mountain slopes, rivers, palms and ingers. he characters come to signify objects (e.g.
trees) and animals (e.g. birds) that may be long gone from view: “hrough Cang Jie’s
mythic vision, humankind gained the ability to see and create meaning (and history) as
our eyes connected to a brain that learns to make meaning in the factory of the mind”
(Hammers, 2014, p. 112).
Xu Bing models his landscape in the early part of the animation on the painting
Autumn Colors on the Qiao and Hua Mountains by the great artist of the Yuan dynasty
(1271–1368), Zhao Mengfu (1254–1322). Zhao’s landscape is brought to life representing
a world where the irst sounds emerge from nature. A myna bird lies in and starts making sounds. A human igure then appears and a battle of sounds between the bird and
the human igure ensues. (Figure 3). he display of characters in the opening sequence
(Figure 2) alludes to another famous work by Zhao, his seven-scroll calligraphy of the
Sutra on the Lotus of the Sublime Dharma, known for its grace and balance, and copied
by many subsequent artists. By recontextualizing the scroll genre and a widely admired
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Language ideologies in the text-based art of Xu Bing
landscape painting by a past master, Xu Bing minimizes the “intertextual gap” between
his work and the tradition of Chinese art, constructing for his viewers a sense of history,
authenticity and community (Briggs & Bauman, 1992; Gal & Woolard, 2001, p. 8; see
also below).
In the following scenes, Xu Bing narrates how writing came to be central in all
areas of Chinese social life: the slow process of literacy education, philosophy, divination, and ritual. For Xu Bing, Chinese characters are highly revered; they represent a
supreme, artful expression of one’s sophistication and demeanour, and an insight into
one’s personality. But writing is also a tool of political power, with emperors and rulers of China throughout Chinese history down to Mao Ze Dong introducing orthographic reforms and inventing new characters and fonts to make their mark and assert
their authority over the people, who had to follow their way of writing and thinking. In
Figure 4, the irst three images from let to right are captioned: “Calligraphy by Emperor
Huzong of Song”, “Calligraphy by Emperor Xuanzong of Tang’, and “Calligraphy by
Yongle Emperor”. he fourth image is a stylized representation of the Communist Party
Congress with a huge portrait and signature of Mao Ze Dong (going let to right) in his
own, simpliied calligraphy. Finally, both the tradition of copying Chinese characters
and their ideographic nature are brought to the present and linked to mass produced
goods in Chinese factories, unauthorized copies of trademarked goods made in China,
and Chinese people’s apparent obsession with luxury brands and their logos, e.g. LV,
CC, CK (Erickson, 2012, p. 19). his is represented in the right-most image in Figure 4,
by a hand holding a pen with a stylus, marking a shopping bag with a generic, red “X”
symbol.
In his aim to show “the relationship between the Chinese language and the unique
origin of the Chinese national character” (Xu Bing, 2012a, p. 34), the artist iconizes
(Irvine & Gal, 2000) Chinese script as distinct from the ‘Western’ tradition (see above)
and as responsible for the artistry, perseverance and spirituality of the Chinese people.
A similar language ideology can be found among many post-Enlightenment scholars, who, according to Irvine and Gal (2000), believed that languages coincided with
nations’ cultural and spiritual dispositions, although predating the political activity of
constructing nationhood. his naturalness and distinctiveness of languages provided
nineteenth-century linguists with a reliable basis for legitimating nation-states, or, in
the case of the European colonial project, polities that were suitable for colonial administration. Implicit in this language ideology is the moral superiority of a nation united
by a common and uniied written script, indicative of the erasure (Irvine & Gal, 2000)
of any linguistic diversity of the Chinese empire, and subsequently, the Chinese nationstate. No matter how much Xu Bing aligns or misaligns with some of the narrated episodes (e.g. politically-motivated orthographic reforms, or consumer-driven obsession
with luxury brand logos), he tells the story of Chinese characters as an intertwined
story of the Chinese national language and Chinese national identity, both of which
arise in tandem through a dialectic process of mutual co-construction (Joseph, 2006;
Silverstein, 2000).
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Book From the Sky (Tianshu) (1987–1991) – Subverting
National Language Ideology
Dated 1987–1991, Book for the Sky was irst exhibited in Beijing in 1988. Subsequent
exhibitions of the enlarged, full-scale work, or its smaller versions, took place in numerous locations in Asia, North America, Australia and Europe. he complete installation
includes four stich-bound volumes with indigo covers referencing traditional Chinese
binding style and scholarly content, presented with hand-carved walnut storage boxes,
with additional copies opened and arranged as a massive rectilinear ‘carpet’ on a low
pedestal on the loor (Figure 5). Large, undulating scrolls hang from the ceiling over
the open books with additional panels hanging on the surrounding walls. he books
and scrolls are all printed with approximately four thousand ‘false’ Chinese characters
invented by the artist and carved onto pear wood printing blocks.
When exhibited for the irst time in Beijing’s National Gallery in 1988, the Book from
the Sky attracted harsh criticism from the central government and created much anxiety, even anger among the visitors who, upon entering the gallery space, inevitably
Figure 5. Xu Bing, Book from the Sky, 1987–1991. Mixed media installation / Hand printed
books, ceiling, and wall scrolls printed from wood blocks inscribed with “false Chinese characters”; dimensions variable. Installation view at “Crossings”, National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa,
1998. ©Xu Bing Studio.
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Language ideologies in the text-based art of Xu Bing
assumed that they would be able to read the text, but on closer inspection of the ‘text’
realized that it was not possible. Although it is commonly acknowledged that in much
cursive calligraphy “the beauty of the brushstrokes and the structure of the characters” are deemed to be more important than the meaning of the words (Harrist, 2013,
p. 33), Xu Bing’s radical separation of calligraphy from literacy confused most of his
audiences and angered many. Harrist explains that these reactions were compounded
by two factors: irst, Xu Bing’s invented characters, at least at irst glance, appear familiar, hence accessible, as they adhere to the conventions of symmetry and internal
structure of real characters and are composed with “perfectly orthodox vertical and
horizontal strokes, diagonals, dots and hooks” (Harrist, 2013, p. 40), and second, the
typeface used by Xu Bing is based closely on the form of the characters known as the
‘Song style’ (Song ti), widely used during the Ming dynasty (1368–1644), known as a
golden age of printing in China (Harrist, 2013, p. 37) (Figure 6). Besides having no
ixed meaning, Xu Bing’s characters have no ixed sounds. Although some Chinese
characters do carry some information of how they should be pronounced, they cannot be ‘sounded out’ in the same way as unfamiliar words can in alphabetic scripts
(Harrist, 2013, p. 39). Following Gal and Woolard (2001), by creating and displaying
the Book from the Sky, Xu Bing imagines a public of illiterates, in particular targeting
the educated and typically literate speakers of Chinese. According to Silbergeld (2006,
p. 20), the work creates a democratizing efect “in a kind of egalitarianism of induced
illiteracy”.
Figure 6. Xu Bing, Book from the Sky, 1987-1991; detail. ©Xu Bing Studio.
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Most commentators on the Book from the Sky emphasize the meaninglessness of its
words, yet the ‘meaning’ of the piece and its various interpretations have been widely
debated. In the absence of discernible propositional content, or perhaps because of this
absence, the emphasis of the debate has oten tended towards the questions of Chinese
writing as a repository and manifestation of ‘Chineseness’, implicitly, and inevitably,
shiting the weight of the debate towards the idea of national language ideology; the idea
that the installation subverts by questioning the standardization of Chinese characters.
From a sociolinguistic point of view, in addition to the apparent structural plausibility of the characters and the readability of their font, there is a third possible reason for
the confusion and discontent felt by many gallery-goers, particularly those who can read
Chinese – the work’s genre. he volumes making up the installation are closely modelled
on recognizable, historical Chinese formats of philosophical, medical, reference and literary books. In their page layout, paper quality, folding, string binding, and the colour of
the covers (indigo), the books follow meticulously the principles of traditional Chinese
book-making. he walnut presentation boxes carefully assembled by hand with wooden
pegs and dovetailed joints amplify the ‘authenticity’ of the books’ appearance and their
gravitas. he only generic innovation, pointing to the inluence of Western art on Xu Bing
in creating the Book from the Sky, is that it is an art installation (Erickson, 2001, pp. 44–45).
Following Bakhtin (1986), Briggs and Bauman (1992) discuss genre as a structural
property of texts, however, not as immanent, ixed and unitary but, despite being conventionalized, as open-ended, emergent and ambiguous. Genre is also indexical, that is
co-occurring with other entities such as the context or subject matter (Briggs & Bauman,
1992, p. 141). Briggs and Bauman consider genre to be “quintessentially intertextual”, that
is linked “to generalized or abstracted models of discourse production and reception”
(ibid., p.147), rather than to single utterances, as, for example, is the case with reported
speech. hus, by invoking a genre, producers of discourse create associations between
their utterances or texts with speciic places, times, persons or acts, and in doing so
they claim authority to decontextualize and recontextualize these temporal, spatial and
social connections for their audiences.
he process of genre recontextualization can have diferent efects depending on the
degree of it between a particular text and its generic model. When the “intertextual gap”
(Briggs & Bauman, 1992, p. 149) is minimized, the text is maximally interpretable due to
its closeness to its generic precedent, and the producer takes the authoritative stance by
sustaining the conservative and traditionalizing textual formats. When the gap is maximized, a degree of disorder, chaos and fragmentation is introduced to the text, possibly
impeding its interpretability, while the producer claims authority by introducing individualizing and creative aspects to his/her discourse.
hrough its title, Book from the Sky is metapragmatically framed as a ‘book’.3 Its formal properties discussed above (printing technique, binding, page layout, typography,
materiality, etc.) demonstrate great care in the artist’s reproduction of recognizable
traditional Chinese book formats. It’s key unreal quality is its unreadable orthography.
As has been mentioned, upon realizing that they cannot read the text of the Book from
the Sky, Chinese speakers felt a degree of unease, confusion or even anger. For them,
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Language ideologies in the text-based art of Xu Bing
probably, unreadable calligraphy could be justiied in some hard-to-read cursive calligraphy inscriptions or rubbings but not in a printed book, especially with perfectly legible typography. What they may have failed to appreciate in that moment was that the
Book from the Sky creatively exploits an intertextual gap being presented in the secondary or complex genre (Bakhtin, 1986; Briggs & Bauman, 1992, p. 154) of an art installation
indexing the vast literary tradition of Chinese writing, libraries and big character posters of the Cultural Revolution era. Unwittingly, the visitors’ reaction co-constructed and
replicated the efect of overload and chaos in Xu Bing’s “loss of meaning” that motivated
him to make the work in the irst place (Erickson, 2001, pp. 38–39).
Although beyond his control, some of these reactions may have been intended by the
artist, precisely by exploiting and celebrating the intertextual gap of the Book from the Sky.
Characterized by its regular and orderly strokes, the song-ti typeface has come to be associated with (or ‘enregistered,’ Agha, 2003) with a degree of formality, conveying factuality and
accessibility; as Xu Bing explains, “over time it has become like the newsprint style of today
[…] I didn’t want to express my own personality. I wanted there to be a tension between
the seriousness of the execution and the presentation and the underlying absurdity that
animates the project” (Leung et al., 1999, p. 89). he piece is, then, a recontextualization
of a tradition, or the idea of tradition in book writing, printing and binding, but it is also
an act of de-individualizing the author, a paradoxical move to create a ‘loss’ of meaning or
knowledge and a sense of disorientation in the ‘readers’ who, upon realizing that the characters they are trying to decipher are deliberately wrong, are re-positioned as an ‘Other’ –
marginalized outsiders and onlookers.4 he invented script, a secret code which is opaque
even to its inventor, establishes the stance of an outsider for the ‘author’ and for the ‘reader’
alike. But, in a throwback to Xu Bin’s experience of the Cultural Revolution, it is also an act
of deiance against language as propaganda in the hands of an oppressive regime.
Finally, the reportedly unsettling efect of the Book from the Sky on the Chinesereading public may have come from their orientation to ‘denotational ideology of
language’ (Silverstein, 1979), which considers the production of denotational (i.e. referential) meaning to be the sole rationale for the existence of language, and the ‘standard
language’, especially in its written form, to be the ideal embodiment of this function.
hus, the deceptively ‘traditional’ appearance of the books and scrolls in the installation
led some visitors to insist on inding at least traces of denotational meaning in the Book
from the Sky (Abe, 1998).
Square Word Calligraphy (1994–) – Dialogic Language
Ideology
he sense of linguistic disorientation that Xu Bing achieved in the Book from the Sky
for his Chinese-reading audience has been replicated in his Square Word Calligraphy
(1994 –) for their English-reading counterpart, albeit with diferent resources and
with diferent efects. Having moved to the United States in 1990, Xu Bing experienced
a sense of linguistic limitation in functioning in the predominantly English-speaking
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environment (Xu Bing, 2001). As a way of reconciling his cultural accentedness
(Blommaert & Varis, 2015), he created a script for writing English that resembles Chinese
characters, which may be considered his linguistic self-portrait. He then developed the
project as a means of engaging the broader public with contemporary art in the spirit of
his socialist stance of art for the people.
Given Xu Bing’s intended bilingual “strategic ambiguity” (Heller, 1988), for Englishspeakers, the text written in Square Word Calligraphy is, at irst sight, unreadable as it
appears to be written in Chinese. On inspection, and not without some diiculty, readers of English can make out the words. he convincing, initial efect of the texts appearing to be Chinese calligraphy is achieved by strict reliance of rendering the letters of
the Latin alphabet according to the elements of Chinese orthography. For example,
‘w’ is rendered as the shan radical 山, and ‘o’ as the kou 口 radical (Lee, 2015, p. 451)
(Figure 7). his systematicity makes it possible for Latin-script users to learn how to
write in square word calligraphy. Some of the installations of Square Word Calligraphy
include interactive ‘classrooms’ with desks, exercise books, brushes, ink, blackboards
Figure 7. Xu Bing, Square Calligraphy Classroom, 1994-1996. Mixed media installation / desk,
chair sets, copy and tracing books, brushes, ink, video; dimensions variable. Exhibition and audience participation view at “hird Asia-Paciic Triennial of Contemporary Art”, Queensland Art
Gallery, Brisbane, Australia, 1999. ©Xu Bing Studio.
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Language ideologies in the text-based art of Xu Bing
and video instruction manuals (Figure 8). Subsequently, a computer programme has
been developed to allow members of the public to type in their surnames in alphabetic
writing and then display their surnames on a large panel in ‘New English Typography’.5
Other works include banners and scrolls with Xu Bing’s own hand-written or printed
calligraphy, which, most famously, include Chairman Mao’s slogan Art for the People on
the banner displayed on the building of the Museum of Modern Art in New York as the
motto for the 1999 exhibition Project 70: Shirin Neshat, Simon Patterson, Xu Bing in the
Museum of Modern Art in New York (Figure 8). Other texts include Chinese poetry in
English translation (Figure 9) and poems by English-language poets, nursery rhymes,
and so forth.
Erickson characterizes Square Word Calligraphy as Xu Bing’s efort “to demystify
Chinese culture and to share the pleasure of calligraphy” (Erickson, 2001, p. 55). his
egalitarian stance, it appears, is underpinned by what might be referred to as Xu Bing’s
dialogic language ideology. In his aim to create a ‘dialogue’ between ‘cultures’ he develops a linguistic tool premised on Bakhtinian dialogism, which Woolard, alongside Lüdi’s
(1987) notion of translingualism, takes as her starting point for the discussion of linguistic simultaneity in bilingual communication. She considers three linguistic forms of
Figure 8. Xu Bing, Art for the People, 1999. Silk banner; 36t x 9t. Installation view at the
entrance of Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1999. ©Xu Bing Studio.
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Figure 9. Xu Bing, Square Word Calligraphy, excerpts from Zhuangzi’s Discussion of Making
All hings Equal, 2014. Exhibition view at “It Begins with Metamorphosis”, Asia Society Hong
Kong Center, 2014. ©Xu Bing Studio.
simultaneity: bivalency, “the use by a bilingual of words or segments that could ‘belong’
equally, descriptively and even prescriptively, to both codes” (Woolard, 1998, p. 7); interference, by which she means “what Haugen calls ‘interference in the strict sense’… a linguistic overlap arising from language contact, in which ‘two systems are simultaneously
applied to a linguistic item’ (1956, p. 50)” (Woolard, 1998, p. 14); and code-switching,
where the apparent use of two discrete languages cannot be easily teased apart on objective or ideological grounds (Gardner-Chloros, 1995).
he bivalent character of Square Word Calligraphy is most apparent with regard
to interference. he execution of English (or other alphabetic) texts in this typeface
by hand requires at least some basic familiarity with the technique of Chinese calligraphy and its application results in the production of orthographically ‘accented’
writing. hese are decidedly linguistic forms, where elements from two distinctive
linguistic traditions can be discerned. In fact, the whole raison d’être of the project
is to bring them together into a dialogic tension, which, according to Holquist, can
be seen as the purposeful enactment of three elements – hybridity, heteroglossia and
polyglossia:
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Language ideologies in the text-based art of Xu Bing
Within the overall concern that Holquist [1990] dubs dialogism, Bakhtinian simultaneities in language include: hybridity, “the mixing, within a single concrete utterance,
of two or more diferent linguistic consciousnesses” (1981, p. 429); heteroglossia,
“that locus where centripetal and centrifugal forces collide,... that which systematic
linguistics must always suppress” (1981, p. 428); and polyglossia, “the simultaneous
presence of two or more national languages interacting within a single cultural system” ([Bakhtin] 1981, p. 431). (cited in Woolard, 1998, p. 4)
Square Word Calligraphy exempliies all the three elements. Lee (2015) considers the
project as an instance of translanguaging (e.g. García & Li Wei, 2014) embodying a
transcultural sensibility (hybridity). he novices learning and practicing square word
calligraphy engage in acts of aesthetically driven, unidirectional double-voicing of codecrossing (Rampton, 1998), appropriating, imitating and distorting Chinese orthography
rather than using it (heteroglossia) (Jaworski, 2014b). Finally, and most evidently, Square
Word Calligraphy introduces formal elements of Chinese writing into the texts and
spaces typically functioning in other linguistic systems (polyglossia).
Although Xu Bing’s Square Word Calligraphy is arguably one of the most sophisticated
instances of the use of two distinct scripts in one text, it is certainly not a unique example
of contemporary heterography (Blommaert, 2008) or digraphia (e.g. Angermeyer, 2012),
and it is not limited to art. Contemporary commercial signage abounds in examples
of similar mixing of scripts – for example in the use of stylized, exoticizing features of
diferent Asian scripts (Chinese, Hindi, or Arabic) in, say, English-language restaurant
signs in the UK and other parts of the world (Jaworski, 2014a). In these instances, the
texts become ‘accented’ according to the simulated scripts in which they are written.
Square Word Calligraphy has a similar moiré language efect found in the metrolingual
(Pennycook & Otsuji, 2015) practices of individuals self-styling as cosmopolitans or
transnationals, and in commercial signage creating symbolic added value of products
and services positioned as translocal or global. Such displays of translingualism subvert
the ideologies of homogeneous, bounded, and reiied languages as formal systems. hey
bring home the idea that many people do not live in stable and uniform speech communities, instead moving across diferent geographical and social spaces, entering ever
luctuating and leeting communities of contact (Pratt, 1987; Rampton, 2009).
Book from the Ground (Dishu) (2003–) – Universal
Language Ideology
he inal example from Xu Bing’s practice to be discussed briely here is his project Book
from the Ground (2003 –), an “ongoing project that explores visual communication
through archival material, an animation ilm, a pop-up concept store, original artworks,
and a computer program that translates Chinese and English into the intermediate language of pictograms” (Borysevicz, 2012, p. 23). Inspired by the pictorial signage of international airports, airplane laminated safety manuals and wrapper instructions for the
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disposal of chewing gum, Xu Bing has amassed and catalogued a wealth of visual symbols, icons, logos, emoticons and punctuation marks from print and electronic sources.
he culminating point of the project so far has been the publication of a novel, a 24-chapter story of a man’s life – Mr. Black – over the course of one day, Point to Point, Book from
the Ground, or to give it its proper title, ‘• →→ •’ (Xu Bing, 2012b) (Figure 10).
Xu Bing’s motivation for creating a universal pictographic language is no diferent
than that of the inventors of inumerable verbal, ‘universal’ languages over the past centuries (Okrent, 2009). Xu Bing explains:
Our existing languages are based on geography, ethnicity, and culture (including allpowerful English), and all fall short. Written languages now face an entirely unprecedented challenge. Today, the age-old human desire for a “single script” has become
a tangible need. his predicament requires a new form of communication better
adapted to the circumstances of globalization. Only today can the implications of the
Tower of Babel truly be revived. (Xu Bing, 2007, p. 71)
he ideology of a universal language driving this project is shared with all the other
attempts at constructing a means of unimpeded, international communication.
Figure 10. Xu Bing, Book from the Ground, 2003-ongoing. Mixed media. Page 2 and 3 from Xu
Bing, Book from the Ground, Taipei: Cheng Pin Gallery, 2012. ©Xu Bing Studio.
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Language ideologies in the text-based art of Xu Bing
Silverstein (2001) discusses one historical example of a related endeavour, Charles
Ogden’s (1889–1957) Basic English, which, with just 850 ‘lexical primes’ or ‘word units’,
was meant to ameliorate language of the emotive burden that had led to war, destruction and social pathology. In other words, it promised a “denotational utopia, marked by
clear, unambiguous, and easily communicated thoughts” (Silverstein, 2001, p. 71). Basic
English was also meant to be learnt quickly (three months, exactly) and used with ease
by speakers of all and any language. Yet, as Silverstein argues, the project of Basic was
premised on the untenable assumption of ‘freeing’ people from the inadequacies of their
own language and the possibility of a time- and culture-neutral communication system
(despite some of the ‘primes’ selected for inclusion in Basic including such dated, from
today’s perspective, words as ink and porter).
In his commentary on Xu Bing’s pictorial language, Hutton also draws parallels with Ogden’s Basic as wells as Otto Neurath’s (1882–1945) International System of
Typographic Picture Education System (ISOTYPE), which had similar ambitions of
“promoting international cooperation and preventing war” (Hutton, 2014, p. 136).
Hutton is sceptical about the intended universality of all these languages. With regard to
Xu Bing’s attempt, he comments that it is likely to be accessible only to “an already highly
literate and technologically integrated member of urban globalized society” (ibid.). Yet,
even members of well-educated globals may encounter problems in interpreting Xu
Bing’s pictorial language unequivocally. For example, Lee (2015, p. 125) reports issues
of ambiguity when ‘reading’ some of the icons, for which, in order to be disambiguated
by the reader, an intersemiotic, visual–verbal dictionary would be needed, practically
undercutting the autonomy of the pictorial language.
However, the success of Xu Bing’s pictorial language as a universal language is only
of secondary importance here. Even by his own admission, “[p]erhaps the idea behind
this project is too ambitious, but its signiicance rests in making the attempt” (Xu Bing,
2007, p. 75). As long as it remains a conceptual art project, its value may lie precisely
in testing the boundaries of the afordances of a pictorial language. Besides, not unlike
numerous other artists (Jaworski, 2017), Book from the Ground demonstrates yet again
Xu Bing’s commitment to a democratizing stance of his ‘language policy’ across a number of his projects, whether turning everyone into illiterates or super-literates capable of
transcending linguistic boundaries.
In my inal section, below, I return to the link between language policy and/as language ideology and discuss some implications of engaging with text-based art in language policy and planning.
Conclusion
At the start of this chapter I linked the idea of language policy and planning with social
actors’ language ideologies and with their individual agency. his idea is not entirely
new. While there are various tensions between ‘macro’- and ‘micro’-level language
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policies, especially at the interface between policy and implementation (Baldauf, 2006),
various authors have commented on the possibility, a need even, to recognize language
planning initiatives operating at diferent scale levels. For example, Mac Giolla Chríost
(2006) discusses how the government-level attempts at maintaining the Irish language
in the Gaeltacht and reviving it in other parts of Ireland are aided by community-based
language-planning initiatives that are both economically relevant and socially inclusive.
Micro-level language planning can foster positive attitudes to the minoritized language
and normalize its use across a wider range of social and institutional domains.
he link between the agency of individual speakers in relation to broader eforts of
language planners to standardize (Lane, 2015) or revitalise (Moriarty & Pietikäinen,
2011) minority languages is now well-documented. Moriarty and Pietikäinen (2011,
p. 365) go as far as to suggest that such localized language planning initiatives “can
be seen to be tailored to the speciic needs of the community”. Roth-Gordon’s (2009)
work demonstrates poignantly how individual language choices are, de facto, microlevel policy decisions ensuring personal security and signalling speakers’ allegiances to
diferent versions of citizenship within a nation state. Busch (2009) shows how localized, thoughtful and liberal language policies valuing linguistic diversity can transform
public institutions (in this case, the central library in Vienna) into non-restrictive, heteroglossic spaces, free from the hegemony of national language ideology and marketdriven language hierarchies.
With regard to the display of languages in public space, Ben-Rafael et al. (2006)
make a distinction between ‘top-down’ and ‘bottom-up’ lows of decisions, i.e., from
public bodies and from undiferentiated individuals, respectively. he latter manifestations of language planning lie beyond policy documents. hey are located in individuals’ decisions, for example, as to which languages should be publically displayed,
or erased from public view (Shohamy, 2006), or what place-names are chosen to designate urban spaces (Mac Giolla Chríost, 2007). Commenting on bilingual language
display in Wales, Coupland (2010) discusses the rigidity and prescriptivism of key
governmental institutions such as Bwrdd Yr Iaith (he Welsh Language Board) insisting on absolute language parallelism. Coupland notes how the linguistic landscape of
Wales shaped ‘from below’ (Coupland’s preferred term in place of ‘bottom up’) demonstrates much variation, creativity and blending of the two languages, escaping the
easy parallelism formula couched in the Welsh government’s consumerist and neoliberal discourse of (language) ‘choice’. As argued by Coupland, the policy of parallelism is itself rooted in the standard language ideology which typically disregards
linguistic creativity and innovation. Coupland contrasts the aesthetically bland and
regimented language parallelism with commodiied texts displayed on t-shirts sold
by a small Welsh company Cowbois. Cowbois design texts on their t-shirts with irony
and obliqueness, play with non-equivalence between Welsh and English, and deploy
dense metacultural resources in articulating the (Welsh) culture that generates them.
According to Coupland (2010, p. 98), for social actors who operate “in the much less
strongly institutionalized periphery […] conformity can give way to creativity and
indirect indexicality”.
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Language ideologies in the text-based art of Xu Bing
here is only a ine line dividing commercially-driven language display (such as on
t-shirts) and conceptual text-based art, itself a commercial activity, frequently disseminated in the form of afordable, consumer language objects (Jaworski, 2015). However, as
I tried to demonstrate in this chapter, despite operating within the powerful institutional
frameworks of galleries and museums, individual text-based artists, like Xu Bing, create
their own private or personal domains of language planning and language engineering.
In so doing they respond to and comment on language planning at the level of the nation
state, or they transcend the nationalist agenda by developing an internationalist dream or
a democratizing stance of planning a universal language for all humanity. With current
emphasis in the studies of language policy on political economy, diversity, social justice
and social inclusion (e.g. Ricento, 2015), turning to text-based art may ofer sociolinguists
a useful lens through which to explore how hegemonic, unorthodox, non-normative,
challenging, inclusive, or ‘merely’ playful language ideologies may exist side by side.
In this sense, and following Wee’s (2016) outlook on interventionist language policy,
artists can be seen as both theorists (or ideologues) of language policy and planning and
as the agents implementing the very policies (or ideologies) that underpin their works.
Commanding language in all its multidimensional complexity (Wee, 2016, p. 345), oten
on a spectacular scale, in an aesthetically arresting manner, attracting large, diverse and
international publics, Xu Bing’s ability to re-inscribe (he Character of Characters), subvert (Book from the Sky), invert (Square Word Calligraphy) and transcend (Book from
the Ground) the modernist, national language ideology can raise our awareness of the
potentialities and the limitations of language, its value, and its role in shaping social relations. And that is why, I believe, the ield of language policy and planning, and sociolinguistics more broadly, may beneit from paying more attention to the creative, aesthetic
and ideological dimensions of text-based art.
Acknowledgements
I thank Chris Hutton, Brook Bolander, Joe Gualtieri and the editors of the Handbook
for their extremely helpful comments on earlier drats of this chapter. he research for
this chapter was supported by an HKSAR Government Funded Research Project (GRF)
2016–2019 titled “Word as Image: he Sociolinguistics of Art” (RGC ref. no. 17600415).
All caveats apply.
Notes
1. his is not to say that ‘language use’ is ever devoid of the ‘meta’ level signiication (Coupland
& Jaworski, 2004), especially in the case of linguistic performance as always a “relexive
activity” (Bell & Gibson, 2011, p. 562) involving “heightened awareness of the act of expression” (Bauman, 1975, p. 293).
2. In a personal note, Christopher Hutton comments that the policy itself dates from the early
1950s, but there was a major initiative in 1964.
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3. Due to limitations of space I do not discuss here the evolution of the work’s title (see, for
example, Abe, 1998; Erickson, 2001 for discussion).
4. his interpretation of the Book from the Sky focuses on its reception by Chinese reading
audiences. Other interpretations of the installation have dominated in the West, particularly in the USA (Abe, 1998). For example, the irst exhibition of A Book from the Sky in the
USA at the Elvejhem Museum of Art, University of Wisconsin–Madison was interpreted
largely in light of the 4 June 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre. In the context of largely
non-Chinese reading audiences, the emphasis has gradually shited towards the form and
aesthetic merits of the work placing the viewers outside of the initial conceit of the piece to
frustrate their attempts to ‘ind’ meaning in the text. he 1995 installation of A Book from the
Sky at the Massachusetts College of Art did so literally by the absence of vertical scrolls on
the gallery walls surrounding the central piece and the viewers. Furthermore, Abe frames
his discussion of the reception of the Book from the Sky in the West in the Orientalist treatment of Chinese writing as emblematic of ‘Chineseness’ (see Hutton, 2006, 2008a).
5. For information about the programme, see http://www.xubing.com/index.php/site/projects/year/1998/your_surname_please; accessed 20 July 2016). he same installation in different formats was subsequently staged in other locations.
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