LOT DETAILS

Materials:

Ink on paper

Size Notes:

4

Description:

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Provenance:

PROVENANCE： Acquired from the Eslite Gallery， Taipei；Sotheby’s Hongkong， 7 Oct 2007， Lot663.The item is held under the bonded status， please check the NOTICE ON AUCTION OF BONDED LOTS in this catalogue for details.As the inheritor of the 85 New Waves， Xu Bing has become a model of the era of interpreting traditional cultural symbols. After the Book from the Sky， a hit in 1980s， Xu Bing once again comprehended the cultural significance of character in the fresh environment of American culture in 1990 and started a bold art experiment of combing the fonts of Chinese and English languages. He obtained the inspiration in the East Village of Lower Manhattan. A letter-filled bar sign reminded him of the system of Chinese characters. Then he broke the usual character structure of Chinese， embedding English letters as strokes. After combining with a number of Chinese characters’ shapes and modifying some certain words to ensure the naturalness of this kind of changing， he finally invented this unique art language in breaking and establishing. However， this new English calligraphy is not intended to present a shallow culture communication， but to reveal the limitation of contemporary thinking methods with blocking the usual thoughts by disorganized semantic system， and then set challenges for visual habits lasting for thousand of years. This distinctive Xu Bing font gradually became the tool used by Xu Bing to explain the proposition of the times and resolve the current culture. New English Calligraphy： Quotations of Chairman Mao series are the significant works of his text experiment. Different from the previous dull presentations of texts， Xu Bing uses this homemade art form to interpret the political narrative in the context of globalization， making each character suggest the way of thinking that belongs only to the Chinese. He takes his old-day memories as an educated youth about Quotations of Chairman Mao to the present， putting the political texts that is familiar to Chinese people into an unfamiliar language system. He uses the symbol system from western world to deconstruct the eastern formal language， so that people are able to comprehend the meaning that Mao conveyed to art. He also completes the critique to the structuralism in linguistics via breaking the burrier of social and cultural background by artistic language. This New English Calligraphy： Quotations of Chairman Mao， which consist of four pieces， is an important representation in the New English Calligraphy series. The form of the work echoes the hanging axis form of traditional Chinese calligraphy art， making the work seem to be a calligraphy piece hanging from a literati’s studio， bringing a different kind of traditional taste. Xu Bing has once said： Artists need to have a kind of universal value. This art for people thinking matched with Mao’s idea about art and makes a cross-age resonance of thoughts through this calligraphy work. In term of content， however， the originality of this political text is in contrast to the form and meaning of reproducibility in the New English Calligraphy， leaving a mark in traditional memory with western symbols. Just as Julia Kristeva said： The only way to walk out of the scenery is to walk through it instead of breaking it. The closely arranged characters in the artwork provided a sense of visual order in the era of mechanical reproduction， quite different from the traditional calligraphy of structuring the blank part like the character part in form. Through the reinterpretation of the oriental pictographic system， it shows the unfamiliar reality of political literary thought in the material age in a specific period.The New English Calligraphy of Xu Bing is transferring the traditional cultural symbols with contemporary artistic language， making a perfect interpretation of Clive Bell’s meaningful form theory. He uses a subversive word game to bring a political pop in the field of calligraphy， igniting the life will buried in the language civilization of the East and the West.