Visuality and translation in contemporary Chinese literary art: Xu Bing’sA Book from the SkyandA Book from the Ground

This article examines two works by contemporary Chinese artist Xu Bing: A Book from the Sky and A Book from the Ground. Focusing on the relationship between text and image in each of these works, it explores the relation between verbality and visuality in multimodal literary art. It argues that the schema of image-in-text and image-as-text underlines different discourses of communication as articulated in these works. A Book from the Sky expresses a negative view of the communicative potential of language by masking up the verbal signifier as an image and puncturing it of semantic meaning. A Book from the Ground, on the other hand, envisions a futuristic realm with a radically different linguistic order, where verbal texts are functionally taken over by visual signs. Seen as a continuum, the language problematic identified in the earlier work finds a solution in the latter, as played out by the different tensions between text and image. In each of these cases, translation serves as a litmus indicator of their underlying discourses.