Oxford Dictionary: Bird Definition

Xu Bing, artist

born 1955

Oxford Dictionary: Bird Definition, 1994–1996

Material/technique: ink; "grass" paper (mao bian)

Dimensions:
Sheet/Paper Dimensions (Height x Width): 48.9 x 271.8 cm
Sheet/Paper Dimensions (Height x Width): 19 1/4 x 107 in

Credit line: Gift of Arthur V. Neis

Accession number: 2008.0015

On display: Simons Gallery

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Looking After: Art and Care in Education Across Kansas

When read from right to left like traditional Chinese calligraphy, the letters of the English word “bird” transform into an image of a bird in flight. Artist Xu Bing is inspired by the evolution of language and text from ancient pictographs to more abstract shapes today, but reverses the process, encouraging viewers to consider the relationships among image, text, symbol, and meaning.

Archive Label:
"From the Way of Writing to the Weight of Writing, " 2007
Oxford Dictionary: Bird Definition is an elaboration of Xu Bing's concept of Square-Word Calligraphy (see his Introduction to Square-Word Calligraphy, also exhibited here). The work was a study for Living Word 2, an installation in which renditions of "bird" rise from the floor to the ceiling as they change from word to pictogram to the form of a bird in flight. In the study, each stage of this migration is set down in a different font or script style moving from modern to ancient, thus connecting a pictographic writing system with the English alphabet.