Book from the Ground

from point to point

Bing Xu (Xu Bing Studio)

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Paperback

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English

MIT Press
06 November 2018

Art & design styles: Postmodernism; Individual artists, art monographs

Series: Book from the Ground

"A book without words, recounting a day in the life of an office worker, told completely in the symbols, icons, and logos of modern life. Twenty years ago I made Book from the Sky, a book of illegible Chinese characters that no one could read. Now I have created Book from the Ground, a book that anyone can read. -Xu Bing Following his classic work Book from the Sky, the Chinese artist Xu Bing presents a new graphic novel-one composed entirely of symbols and icons that are universally understood. Xu Bing spent seven years gathering materials, experimenting, revising, and arranging thousands of pictograms to construct the narrative of Book from the Ground. The result is a readable story without words, an account of twenty-four hours in the life of ""Mr. Black,"" a typical urban white-collar worker. Our protagonist's day begins with wake-up calls from a nearby bird and his bedside alarm clock; it continues through tooth-brushing, coffee-making, TV-watching, and cat-feeding. He commutes to his job on the subway, works in his office, ponders various fast-food options for lunch, waits in line for the bathroom, daydreams, sends flowers, socializes after work, goes home, kills a mosquito, goes to bed, sleeps, and gets up the next morning to do it all over again. His day is recounted with meticulous and intimate detail, and reads like a postmodern, post-textual riff on James Joyce's account of Bloom's peregrinations in Ulysses. But Xu Bing's narrative, using an exclusively visual language, could be published anywhere, without translation or explication; anyone with experience in contemporary life-anyone who has internalized the icons and logos of modernity, from smiley faces to transit maps to menus-can understand it."

By: Bing Xu (Xu Bing Studio)
Imprint: MIT Press
Country of Publication: United States
Dimensions: Height: 219mm, Width: 148mm, Spine: 10mm
ISBN: 9780262536226
ISBN 10: 0262536226
Series: Book from the Ground
Pages: 128
Publication Date: 06 November 2018
Recommended Age: From 18 years
Audience: General/trade , ELT Advanced
Format: Paperback
Publisher's Status: Active

"Xu Bing is an internationally acclaimed artist whose work has been shown and collected by museums and galleries including the National Art Museum of China; the British Museum; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; the Museum of Modern Art; the Metropolitan Museum of Art; and the Arthur M. Sackler Gallery at the Smithsonian Museum. He is a recipient of a MacArthur ""genius"" grant and is currently serving as Vice President of the Central Academy of Art, Beijing. Based in Beijing, he maintains a studio in Brooklyn."

Reviews for Book from the Ground: from point to point

While this book might turn off readers looking to escape into a more conventional narrative, anyone interested in experimental fiction, modern art, or a little bit of challenge will be delighted. -Library Journal