Xu Bing: 'Book from The Sky'

Institution: The National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa
Materials: Mixed media installation / Hand-printed books and scrolls printed from blocks inscribed with ''false'' characters.

An installation that took Xu Bing over four years to complete, A Book from The Sky is comprised of printed volumes and scrolls containing four thousand ''false'' Chinese characters invented by the artist and then painstakingly hand-cut onto wooden printing blocks.

Vetula

Before Christianisation, in traditional pagan European culture it was believed that the spirit of the "corn" (in modern American English, "corn" would be "grain") lived amongst the crop, and that the harvest made it effectively homeless. J.G. Frazer devotes chapters in The Golden Bough to "Corn-Mother and Corn-Maiden in Northern Europe" (chs. 45-48) and adduces European folkloric examples collected in great abundance by W. Mannhardt. Among the customs attached to the last sheaf of the harvest were hollow shapes fashioned from the last sheaf of wheat or other cereal crops. The corn spirit would then spend the winter in this home until the "corn dolly" was ploughed into the first furrow of the new season. "Dolly" may be a corruption of "idol" or may have come from the Greek word 'eidolon' (that which represents something else as does the word 'idol').

Hoe's One Cylinder Printing Press

Valentine's Day Workshop

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