Xu Bing is arguably the contemporary Chinese artist best known to audiences outside of China. Winner of a prestigious MacArthur Fellowship and the subject of several one-person shows at small museums around the country, he has received worldwide recognition and has been the subject of several critical essays. Word Play: Contemporary Art by Xu Bing brought together several periods of the artist’s work for the first time in a major American museum exhibition. Like many Chinese artists living and working in a postmodern, global art world, Xu has had to engage with the question of shifting and multiple audiences for his work. The exhibition and its catalogue, The Art of Xu Bing: Words without Meaning, Meaning without Words, reflect the artist’s central concern with written language and the ways in which language operates in human societies. Yet, through his exploration of the written word’s ability and inability to communicate within or across cultures, Xu has also examined the role that contemporary art plays outside of the narrow confines of the art-world elite. As a result, both the exhibition and catalogue are clearly aimed at a broad audience, with the latter serving as a complement to the exhibition rather than as a detailed list of entries related only to the works included in the show. In examining Xu’s entire career, the author and curator Britta Erickson has provided a fuller context for understanding his art.

The catalogue is arranged thematically, yet for the most part it also follows the artist’s career chronologically. The book begins with a brief autobiographical statement by Xu. Elsewhere he has described himself as belonging to the generation of Chinese artists who have lived through ten years of socialist education, ten years of cultural revolution, ten years of open-door policy, and ten years of living in the West. Here he talks about his fascination with the written word in all of these periods. The subsequent chapters, written by Erickson, identify five key themes that intersect with the artist’s “word play,” in addition to highlighting distinctive periods of his career.

In the first chapter, Erickson opens her examination of Xu’s oeuvre by demonstrating his early impulse to undermine paradigms in a period when such an impulse was potentially dangerous. This corresponds to his early experience as a youth sent out to the countryside during the Cultural Revolution, his positions at the Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing—first as a student then as a teacher—and his early printmaking. In this section Erickson emphasizes the social and political environment in China during the 1970s and 1980s and Xu’s ability to create innovative art within the existing political and institutional systems. Because the catalogue is aimed at a general audience, it contains a series of two-page color sections in most chapters that explain a type of Chinese art or artistic process related to Xu’s work. In this section, the explanatory inset focuses on official poster art produced during the Cultural Revolution.

Xu’s breakthrough project, A Book from the Sky, exhibited in the famous China/Avant-Garde exhibition in Beijing in 1989, was the work that brought him critical attention both in China and in the international art world. Erickson devotes the second chapter to contextualizing this work’s genesis and its reception in China. She shows how both Xu’s interest in the visual form of language rather than its content and his awareness of the unreliability of language led to the creation of a work that subverted audience expectations in several surprising ways. First, unlike other avant-garde artists of the day, Xu adopted the traditional techniques and forms of wood-block printed books and produced finely crafted objects that appeared to be just like traditional Chinese texts. Viewers were then shocked to discover that every single character that seemed to be genuine was invented by the artist, rendering the thousands of pages of text displayed in books and from sheets hanging from the ceiling and walls utterly meaningless. In the crackdown on forms of expression after the Tiananmen massacre, officials singled out Xu’s “words without meaning” as an example of a “trend counter to the Communist Party’s artistic direction and policies” (41).

As a result, Xu emigrated to the United States in 1990, where he experienced his most visceral sense of displacement in attempting to learn a new language. During this period, both Book from the Sky and Ghosts Pounding the Wall, a work produced in China right before his move to the U.S., were exhibited outside of China and faced an entirely different audience. Erickson examines this period of Xu’s work in terms of his fascination with cross-cultural translation and mistranslation, which led to his efforts to create new forms of writing. Grappling with a Western audience, he studied Western book traditions and translated the same type of subversion of expectations found in Book from the Sky into works like Post Testament, in which gold-embossed calfskin volumes open to reveal finely printed Gothic letters and illuminated capitals of nonsensical pastiches of English texts. At this time Xu also challenged the authority of the written word to determine artistic value or merit in installations like Wu Street, in which anonymous discarded paintings were reframed, exhibited, and attributed to a fictitious artist. The works and artist’s name were then inserted into an article about another well-known painter and published in China, where no one would be able to challenge the critical authority of the text.

Xu continued to explore the limitations of language in a series of performance pieces that involved animals. In chapter 4, “To Be Human,” Erickson discusses these animal performance works and analyzes Xu’s strategies for revealing the layers of culture that suppress natural instincts. In these works, the audience is made aware of humanity’s interest in and control over natural forces and the possibility that nature may sometimes prevail over human culture. In all of these performances, animals and language come together visually through physical layering, but the superficial connection underscores the artificial and constrictive character of the written word as a means of expression.

In the last chapter, Xu’s background as an art worker serving the masses emerges in his growing concern with cross-cultural communication and critique of the elitism found in the art world. This more recent phase of the artist’s career further developed the “Square Word Calligraphy” that he devised in the mid-1990s. In An Introduction to Square Word Calligraphy, Classroom Calligraphy, and other related works, Xu specifically created interactive pieces that seek to demystify the exoticism that the West projects onto Chinese culture as well as to challenge notions of cultural authenticity. While this work has been criticized as pandering to those same Western conceptions of what constitutes “essential” characteristics of Chinese culture, by engaging and often delighting ordinary people these installations begin to make audiences aware that their assumptions and misconceptions are obstacles to intercultural exchange. At the same time, the artworks also optimistically suggest that the possibility of such an exchange may be found in surprising spaces.

The strength of this catalogue is its detailed summary of the artistic climate in China during the 1970s and 1980s and the close linking of the works with the artist’s personal history. Although Xu lives in New York, at least one pivotal work—the performance piece entitled A Case Study in Tranference—was produced in China. Thus, Xu’s artistic concerns and production would be more fully contextualized if the author had included a brief discussion of Xu’s relationship to other contemporary Chinese artists whose work engages with similar issues. Consequently, although she highlights Xu’s struggle with the apparently contradictory demands of diverse audiences, Erickson has excluded from this narrative those audiences that are most immediately related to the artist: the contemporary Chinese avant-garde and the New York art scene. Art critics and historians may wish for more critical readings of Xu’s work in a catalogue of this scope, although the author does include a good annotated bibliography of English essays that address various interpretations of Xu’s art. These omissions aside, the comprehensive range, detailed biographical context, and clarity of organization, as well as the excellent full-color illustrations throughout, have helped further Xu’s current goal of making his art “serve the people.”