  ROOKLYN, NEW YORK -- Xu Bing’s studio here is crowded with Chinese character posters and scrolls. On the walls, the floors, on table tops and stacked in the corners, sometimes rolled up, other times tattered and worn, are elegant Chinese characters, artfully sketched, painted or printed in black.
They are the markers, imprints and latest works of one of China's most celebrated contemporary artists -- an artist who makes his living playing with words and symbols, reinventing language with the brush, pen, woodblock prints and even the computer. This is the artist who pushes others to consider the uses and abuses of symbols and language. This is also a man who admits that he spent part of his youth fervently producing propaganda posters for Mao during China's Cultural Revolution. And yet to this day, Xu Bing is a man of relatively few words.
" I really don't have much to say," the 51-year-old says sipping water here a few weeks ago. "My English is really not very good so I'm not sure what I can tell you."
His language is not so much the spoken word but the language of art and symbols, he says quietly.
But Xu Bing's understated charm is deceptive. The MacArthur Foundation loudly declared him brilliant in 1999, when it awarded him one of its prestigious genius awards along with a check for $315,000. The Smithsonian's Sackler Gallery in Washington, D.C. honored him in 2001 by making him the first living artist to ever be given a solo exhibition. And last fall, when his piece, "The Living Word," was put up for auction by Sotheby's, the collector Michael Goedhuis snapped it up for a cool $408,000 -- one of the highest prices ever paid for a work by a Chinese contemporary artist.
 "He's one of the most innovative artists," says Mr. Goedhuis. "He's key for the whole world."
Indeed, Xu Bing -- who has lived in the United States since 1990 -- is widely considered one of the world's most creative artistic minds. He is also an artist who in the 1980s was denounced by the Chinese government for his provocative and disturbing works. And yet today, he is perhaps the only artist willing to say that so much contemporary art is foolish and that he's temporarily abandoned it to make furniture.
"I'm sick of contemporary art," he says in his studio here. "Artists are so smart and yet they don't do anything worthwhile. So I'm designing a new type of computer. It's going to move while you type, It's kind of like Taichi."
This is Xu Bing at his best, talking about toying with language, rethinking old concepts and habits and always showing a willingness to break with convention and tradition -- even while seeming to uphold it.
This is what he's been doing since the 1980s, when he stormed onto the art scene in China with his groundbreaking work, "Book from the Sky." To create the book, he designed, carved and printed a series of what appeared to be ancient literary texts using a set of thousands of invented or fake Chinese characters.
Since then, he has won acclaim for "Ghosts Pounding the Wall," a 1991 installation piece made by rubbing the Great Wall with ink and paper. Later, in New York, he invented "Square Word Calligraphy," his own English language alphabet in the form of Chinese characters -- characters he himself created.
Since then, he's painted Chinese characters onto the backs of live pigs, placed silkworms in his works and produced installations and words out of mere dust.
 And at a time when the price of Chinese contemporary art is soaring, collectors are bidding up the value of the most established artists -- the pioneers. And their names are now familiar in the international market: Huang Yongping, Cai Guoqiang, Gu Wenda, Wang Guangyi and Zhang Xiaogang. And Xu Bing.
They are the men who made the transition -- from Soviet realist and propaganda art -- to the avant-garde.
Some, like Xu Bing, Gu Wenda, Cai Guoqiang and Huang Yongping, left the country after the pro-democracy movement was crushed in 1989, dealing an equally large blow to the growing art movement.
Others, like Wang Guangyi, Fang Lijun and Zhang Xiaogang, stayed behind -- and began creating their own styles and takes on the new art movements.
And now, more than 15 years later, the first chapters of the post-1989 art movement are being written. And people like Xu Bing are being recognized.
This is what the distinguished independent curator Britta Erickson wrote about Xu Bing. "Much of Xu Bing's oeuvre deals with issues related to language or to being human -- issues that can be tightly intertwined. He has discovered how to lead people to learning about their own natures by confronting them with unexpected situations. For example, museum visitors are drawn to read a text the artist has put on display, only to find the text is impossible to read. His audience is forced to reconsider their assumptions about the value and reliability of the written word."
 I. AWAKENINGS.
 u Bing was born in 1955 in the city of Chongqing, then part of western Sichuan Province. His parents were originally from coastal Zhejiang Province, but met in Shanghai, where his father had enrolled in an art school.
His family later moved to Chongqing, where Xu Bing was born, the middle of five children, and then to Beijing, where his father took up a position teaching at the country’s most prestigious school, Beijing University. His mother served as a librarian there.
Surrounded by texts and scholars, Xu Bing says he came to dwell on the meaning and value of books and language.
As a boy not yet able to read, he said, he often visited the library, and fell in love with books. There were so many books to read, and yet the pages and characters were incomprehensible to him. "All I could do was touch the books," he said.
By the time he was able to read, however, the Cultural Revolution had broken out. Many books were destroyed or banned in an age when books and intellectuals were under fire. But one book reigned supreme: " Mao’s Little Red Book." And the entire nation was instructed to read, memorize and quote from it.
Xu Bing recalls the dramatic swing in the nation's reading culture, and his own struggle to come to terms with words and language.
" This is strange," he says. "When I couldn't read there were so many books. But when I was finally able to read, there was only one book."
 These ideas -- about books, language and propaganda -- would later become key concepts and influences behind his creation of "Book From the Sky," a work in which he created fake or pseudo Chinese characters, an unreadable, deceptive language that was both artfully presented and yet puzzling to its earliest Chinese readers, many of whom took it for a real book made up of little known characters.
But art was a long way off for young Xu Bing. In the mid 1960s, when reading was just coming into focus, the Cultural Revolution broke out and his father was branded part of a "black gang" of bourgeois intellectuals.
His father, who was later imprisoned, was paraded through the streets of Beijing in an age of dunce caps and public humiliations. In her book, "Nine Lives: The Birth of Avant-Garde Art," the British art critic Karen Smith quotes Xu Bing talking about one of the most difficult moments of his young life.
"Once I was with friends when in a great commotion on the road ahead of us, we saw shouting people marching with banners, and with a big crowd following behind," Xu Bing recounts. " My friends thought it was terribly exciting. The first 'black gang' member I saw was my father. I couldn't bear to look. He had been made to wear an enormous pair of shoes, which weighed him down so that he almost had to be dragged along. None of my friends knew it was my father; in the state he was in he was hardly recognizable."
II. THE PROPAGANDA ARTIST.
 oon after, Xu Bing, still a teenager, left home. He was sent to the countryside, to a region called Yanqing, outside Beijing, to farm and to live among the peasants.
During that period, he says he encountered tremendous physical hardships. But he also says he started producing propaganda posters in an attempt to atone for his father’s sins.
" When I think about that period, things were very bad," he says now. "But when you're in that period you don't feel that bad because everyone is in that situation. My family had a bad background. And Jiang Qing (Mao's fifth wife) said if a father's great, the son will be great. But if the parents are bad, you'll be a bad egg. I got to prove myself in the arts, so I did a lot of propaganda."
 Indeed, Xu Bing had a knack for drawing from an early age, because his father instructed him to practice calligraphy.
And so when it came time to create propaganda posters, or the so-called “big character” posters of the age, Xu Bing was expert.
At the time, he recalls: “There were big posters everywhere, even on the roads. Sometimes, there were not enough boards, so you’d just hang it on a clothes line.”
He went on:“Mao sometimes issued new orders or directions, and whenever he did, people had to create new posters over night. All the children wanted to show they were part of the revolution, so they all did it.”
In a strange way, in the chaos of the Cultural Revolution, when children denounced their parents and students assaulted their teachers, when the nation was turned upside down, art became much more than a thing of aesthetic appeal or comfort: art was power; “Big Character” posters changed the course of history, and made or destroyed lives. Art mattered. And Xu Bing says there was a sense of empowerment among the people who created the posters.
“I wanted to be involved in propaganda,” he says. “I believed it; and I think most people believed it. And I loved art, so I wanted to make the propaganda beautiful.”
He adds: “I remember the day Mao died. I felt after that day, what you do doesn’t have meaning.”
But Xu Bing’s artistic career had really not even begun. He got a chance to show his art in the National Gallery in Beijing. And when he applied to study at Beijing’s prestigious Central Academy of Fine Arts, that work may have meant something.
 Initially admitted to the Beijing Film Academy, Xu Bing quickly moved to the Central Academy in the late 1970s, where he was enrolled in the print making department.
But already, Xu Bing had shown incredible talent, even in painting. A student held up his sketch of David’s “Michelangelo” for years afterward as a model sketch.
And so when he graduated in 1981 (he later earned an MFA), Xu Bing joined the faculty, and for 10 years he taught at the Central Academy, which was still under the spell of Soviet realism.
But in 1984, Xu Bing says, he attended an exhibition of North Korean works being shown at the National Gallery. And a light went off. This was the “Open Door” period in China; new art movements were coming into being. Western art was beginning to get notice in Beijing.
And suddenly, Maoist and North Korean art looked ugly and stale.
“I saw the show at the National Gallery,” Xu Bing says. “They showed some really stupid socialist art. I could see the art around me was really stupid. I thought, ‘I must change my art.’ At the time, all I knew is I should get away from this art. But I didn’t know what I should do. We didn’t have western contemporary art. But this pushed me to find something.”
A year later, the ’85 New Wave Art movement got under way with emerging stars like Gu Wenda and Wu Shanzhuang, both of whom had experimented with language and re-interpreting big character posters. And soon after, Xu Bing was to find his own way to play with language.
III. “BOOK FROM THE SKY”
 he 1980s were a time, Xu Bing now says, when everyone in China was hungry for knowledge. People were reading Nietzche, Schiller and studying Beuys and Warhol. Rauschenberg even exhibited in Beijing. And Xu Bing too was reading, a lot. And he grew sick of it. And then, he says, he began to think back to his youth, and his own passage to literacy, as well as the era of the single book.
Then he made up his mind: he would simply create his own book, with his own language, and his own fake Chinese characters.
 And so, for three years, beginning in 1987, he worked on what would become “A Book from the Sky,” a book of invented characters -- characters that he painstakingly created by using old dictionaries and texts.
The title came from a common Chinese phrase about an unreadable text or book. People would call that “Tian Shu,” or “Book from the Sky.”
And in Xu Bing’s Tian Shu, he didn’t simply create fake characters, he followed a very strict system basing his characters on real character roots. And each new character was carefully carved into wood, to create a new wood block page.
In his studio, he demonstrated his technique, pulling a large Chinese dictionary from his shelf, and paging through it, showing how he chose different pages to follow, different characters to mix together, in a systematic routine.
“See I’d follow this old dictionary from the simple to the complex,” he says, opening the dictionary. “See here, one stroke, three strokes, ten strokes. You can put the water part with the mountain part and you will think the character is about the landscape.”
When the first part of his “Book from the Sky” went on display at the National Gallery in Beijing in 1988, it created a stir. The book was viewed as a stab at classical culture, or a deceptive critique of the ruling Communist Party.
Somehow, observers surmised, that in the age of avant-garde art, Xu Bing was speaking out about the emptiness in official language, or the emptiness of tradition. Or perhaps he had created a secret language to denounce the state.
Some scholars were even too embarrassed to admit they didn’t understand the text, thinking it was simply made of some little-known Chinese characters.
“The show was in 1988. Then after the show I went back and continued to produce the book,” he says. “I really finished a real book -- not just a show or art but a real book.”
When the book was finally completed in 1990, Xu Bing had invented 4,000 characters, all exquisitely carved onto wood blocks. The pages were artfully displayed in China with large sheets or blankets of printed paper covering the walls, and even hanging from the ceiling.
 “I wanted to show the letters, the whole space,” he says. “Then you can see letters everywhere. You are covered by letters. When people first come into it they find that it’s like a temple. But when they try to read it it’s unreadable. When people see it they feel nervous. Why, this beautiful book I can’t read?”
By the time he produced “A Book from the Sky,” Xu Bing was already a prominent artist in a country where groups of artists were forming, like the Xiamen Dada group, led by Huang Yongping, and the Harbin group, formed by Wang Guangyi.
But in Beijing, the saying went, there was only Xu Bing. And that made Xu Bing an easy target.
After June 4, his “Book from the Sky,” took on an even stronger tone, being seen along with other avant-garde art as ugly and foolish. It was not art for the people. The government denounced the work.
But by then Xu Bing was already busy at work on another massive work, “Ghosts Pounding the Walls,” what critics have called a monumental rubbing of the Great Wall.
Xu Bing had set up scaffolding and with a group of friends and students started putting the Great Wall on rice paper -- literally rubbing its sides and essentially creating a kind of ink etching of every crack and crevice along a section of the wall.
After he completed most of the work, and after he and his art work had been censored by the Chinese government, Xu Bing moved to the United States, in 1990, to teach at the University of Wisconsin at Madison.
By then, Xu Bing was already an international figure. And within a few years, his notoriety would spread in the west -- in Hong Kong, Sydney, New York and Venice. And culminate with his MacArthur genius award in 1999.
IV. WORD PLAY.
 or the last 16 years, he has worked mostly in New York, building on that reputation.
In recent years, he has spent much of his time in Brooklyn, where he has a new studio, which is still partly under construction. He lived here for a while with Cai Jin, another well-known Chinese artist. The couple has a daughter but have since separated.
 Today, Xu Bing looks much the same as he did a decade ago. He’s got moppy hair, round, scholarly glasses. And he speaks in a low, quiet voice, appearing humble and reserved.
But at a time when many Chinese contemporary artists are still playing with western drawing and concepts, and reinterpreting symbols of the country and the nation -- Xu Bing continues to toy with the most primitive of symbols, those of the Chinese language, characters that evolved from pictographs.
He says he is not attacking tradition, but simply rethinking and reinterpreting it, finding his own way to comment on what has gone on before him.
“We really don’t understand traditional art because Mao broke tradition,” he says. “Mao changed tradition. But Chinese people, we had a tradition. But not through education or reading. We are getting the tradition from the family, from the family habit. Tradition comes from the blood.”
Xu Bing’s work, though, often looks like an assault on tradition. In the United States, he created “Brailliterates,” an installation using Braille and text to play on the distinctions between what can be seen and what can’t. And the came “Language Lost” and “Square Word Calligraphy,” his own invented alphabet where he uses English language alphabet in shapes that appear to represent Chinese characters.
He’s painted landscapes dotted with Chinese characters, hung characters dangling on strings from the ceiling; painted characters onto the backs of live pigs, and even created his own leather bound Bible, “The Post Testament,” that interspersed the language of the King James Bible, with text from Breton Easton Ellis’s novel “American Psycho,” as well as tax returns -- all a play on the blending of cultures, the chaos of language -- and the hidden, confused and double meanings that can be bound up in life, and in beautifully volumes.
Again and again, critics say, Xu Bing is forcing viewers of his works and installations, to confront language -- to see its origins, its contradictions, it’s beauty and its cycles.
Back in his studio, Xu Bing is talking, for example, about his current stint as the art director of “City Life,” a cultural magazine created by Thomas Shao, the well-known publisher of Modern Weekly and other Chinese magazines. (The magazine’s music editor? Tan Dun.)
 Xu Bing opens a recent issue of “City Life” and shows an original art piece he created; it’s related to his “Tobacco Project,” which features stationary from an American tobacco company from North Carolina. The picture shows an invoice -- essentially showing the language of American corporate domination -- when tobacco earnings came from China directly into the coffers of America’s elite. On an adjoining page is a check made payable to Xu Bing, from Duke University, which was founded by tobacco barons, for an art piece Xu Bing prepared.
The money returns home, he says, in a way, suggesting all things come full circle.
And nothing has returned more money than “The Living Word,” his installation of 400 carved acrylic characters that dangle from strings in the shapes of an evolving Chinese pictographs for the word “bird.”
The installation rises up, soaring in the shape of a bird and in what one critic called “an extended meditation upon the relationship between words and their referents, historical origins and subsequent transformations.”
The piece was auctioned off by Sotheby’s last fall for $408,000 -- far above it’s estimate of $250,000 to $300,000.
Now, Xu Bing is back in his studio, talking about language. And he’s struggling to find the right English words to express himself.
 “The pictograph system is really interesting,” he says. “I can really touch the basic part. I can touch the key part. The Chinese pictographs and how Chinese say things. We think about beauty and not beauty by my idea. Chinese people think of something, their way of thinking. Chinese methods are really different because our writing system is different. Now characters are not like pictures but they still have elements. When you are reading it must have some relationship with the mind. How does one influence the other. So you’re writing the word for mountain. I want to play with Chinese letters. And we can play in a very interesting way. In English you can only write about the concept of birds. But in Chinese you can do more.”
For now, however, Xu Bing says he is turning his focus. He’s working on a project that involves creating a giant electronic board in Kenya, a United Nations art project that he hopes will track the growth or destruction of the forests there. It’s a project that follows one of his deepest thoughts: the idea that art should serve the people; a concept that sounds awfully Maoist.
And he is doing something even more practical. He’s designing computer work stations with the help of a Beijing company and a professor at Beijing’s distinguished Tsinghua University, the so-called M.I.T. of China.
“When you are working on a computer desk, when you are typing, it moves, very slowly, “ he says. “It’s like Taichi. Many people have this problem. Also, the eyes and muscles have problems and many companies design around it and it really doesn’t work. But in Taichi they believe if you move one hair, your whole body will move.”
This, he says, is putting artists to the ultimate test.“I don’t think about art,” he says. “I just do work.”
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