Starting in the 1980s, a little before the Tiananmen carnage, Xu Bing spent three years carving more than four thousand Chinese characters on wood blocks. These he then printed, on a traditional press, producing from them a series of scrolls and books and posters, which were bound and mounted in various ways. What is remarkable, however, is that the ideographic characters in these finely crafted works are, literally speaking, meaningless, a nonsense script , as it were. The work is thoughtful, provocative, not simply slick . Half drowned by the beauty of the aesthetic form, we are caught unaware by the nonsense always already in the work.
Immense enjoyment is followed by betrayal.
Different notes Of a different order than the works one has been speaking of was the work of the artist Chang Dai-Chien, also a contemporary but not a modernist. This remarkable man, who died in 1983 at the age of 85, is often spoken of as being among the last examples of the traditional Chinese romantic artist . Yes, for his energy was prodigious.