Visuality and translation in contemporary Chinese literary art: Xu Bing’s A Book from the Sky and A Book from the Ground

Abstract

This article examines two works by contemporary Chinese artist Xu Bing: A Book from the Sky and A Book from the Ground. Focusing on the relationship between text and image in each of these works, it explores the relation between verbality and visuality in multimodal literary-art. It argues that the schema of image-in-text and image-as-text underline different discourses of communication as articulated in these works. A Book from the Sky expresses a negative view of the communicative potential of language by masking up the verbal signifier as an image and puncturing it of semantic meaning. A Book from the Ground, on the other hand, envisions a futuristic realm with a radically different linguistic order, where verbal texts are functionally taken over by visual signs. Seen as a continuum, the language problematic identified in the earlier work finds a solution in the latter, as played out by the different tensions between text and image. In each of these cases, translation serves as a litmus indicator of their underlying discourses.