Landscript Postcards

Xu Bing, artist

born 1955

Landscript Postcards, 1999–2000

Where object was made: Nepal

Material/technique: offset lithograph; Nepalese paper; plastic

Dimensions:
Sheet/Paper Dimensions (Height x Width): 120 x 170 mm
Mat Dimensions (Height x Width): 16 x 20 in

Credit line: Museum purchase: Gift of Arthur Neis and the Museum of Art Acquisition Fund

Accession number: 2008.0333.01-4

Not on display

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Images

Label texts

Cryptograph: An Exhibition for Alan Turing

Adding a twist to the pictographic roots of Chinese writing, Xu Bings’s landscripts represent landscape elements with appropriate characters—the character “tree” for a tree (or many of them for a forest), a pile of the character “mountain” for a mountain, etc. The landscripts also incorporate sentences describing the changing elements in the landscape. Thus the “landscape” can be read both pictorially and verbally. This series of postcards reproduces landscript drawings in Xu Bing’s sketchbooks made during a trip to the Himalayan mountains outside of Katmandu. The postcards were sold as part of the artist’s effort to raise funds for the poor he encountered in Nepal.

Exhibition Label:
"Cryptograph: An Exhibition for Alan Turing," Mar-2012, Stephen Goddard
Adding a twist to the pictographic roots of Chinese writing, Xu Bings’s landscripts represent landscape elements with appropriate characters-the character “tree” for a tree (or many of them for a forest), a pile of the character “mountain” for a mountain, etc. The landscripts also 44 incorporate sentences describing the changing elements in the landscape. Thus the “landscape” can be read both pictorially and verbally. This series of postcards reproduces landscript drawings in Xu Bing’s sketchbooks made during a trip to the Himalayan Mountains outside of Katmandu. The postcards were sold as part of the artist’s effort to raise funds for the poor he encountered in Nepal.