CARME CENTER. Museum, 2
Provocation or game? Complaint or joke? The work of Chinese artist Xu Bing is a mystery that we are eager to reveal. Let's start. A huge red flag rests at the entrance to the exhibition. It seems to be written in Chinese but, In fact, each Chinese spelling is an English word with letters from our alphabet. Art for the people, dice. From here, every installation is a game: the public can learn to read and write this new writing system in Square word calligraphy, a recreation of a Chinese calligraphy classroom where we have a brush and ink to practice; with its particular system, the artist translates the poem The good town, of Ausiàs March, in the next room; Book from the sky presents us with a room full of Chinese characters engraved on paper whose reading is impossible, since they have all been invented by the artist; Background story It seems to be a classic oriental drawing, but what we think of as ink on paper turns out to be the shadows cast by a mess of debris in light boxes; the last room is a recreation of his studio, where we will meet Book from the ground, the story of Mr Black told by icons with which Xu Bing has created a universal language, only with drawings, not a word. It is not easy to reveal the enigma, but through these different languages we approach an artist who wants to discover his culture, approaching ours, because there are confluences between humans that surpass written language. GLORIA POZUELO
