Xu Bing’s “New English Calligraphy” has attracted worldwide attention since the 1980s. He searches for a certain uniformity and confluence in form between the most fundamental cultural symbols from both the East and the West. In doing so he has created the work New English Calligraphy, a piece linking together the civilisations of the East and the West. The artist uses a traditional Chinese writing brush as a tool to Sinicise the letters of the English alphabet, retaining the block like structure and vertical format of classical Chinese characters, creating a script that is a somehow familiar stranger. The script is read from left to right, top to bottom, outside in.

The written content of the piece Quotations of Chairman Mao- Speech at the Yan’an Forum of Art and Literature is taken from Mao Zedong’s 1942 “Speech at the Yan’an Forum on Literature and Art” in which the official line of “art being to serve the workers, peasants and military” appeared, influencing an entire generation of artists and artistic pursuit. Through the use of his postmodern “New English Calligraphy”, the artist successfully dismantles the concept of Mao’s speech, however this dismantlement is not done in the name of nihilism, rather it is created to evoke a broader sympathetic response with the values of the contemporary era.

Curator Feng Boyi once commented of Xu Bing’s New English Calligraphy that “in a culture of encounters and collisions between “the dominant and the inferior”, this piece enables dialogue on a more equal basis.” The artist intentionally partially removes the functionality and readability of Chinese characters to create an environment spanning time, space, culture and language- an environment in which to invent, innovate and exchange culture through reconstructive means.

(Edited by Lijie Wang & Miao Zijin)