Landscripts

The art works in the Museum of Art and Design show that I mentioned last time involve the transformation of 'organic materials and objects that were once produced by or part of living organisms-insects, feathers, bones, silkworm cocoons, plant materials, and hair-to create intricately crafted and designed installations and sculptures'.  It looks like another landscape-related highlight will be an installation by Xu Bing, who 'will make a shadow version of a 24-foot Song Dynasty painting using only vegetable detritus, weeds, leaves, and roots'.  Xu Bing has also made a series of works called Landscripts which develop ideas I've discussed here before of the Chinese written character and the depiction of a landscape through patterned words. For example, a 2003 version in Sydney's New South Wales Museum was created 'on the large plate-glass windows of the museum lobby' where 'Xu wrote out an image of the landscape visible through them by using Chinese characters to represent the individual landscape elements: for example, a clump of trees was represented by a clump of the Chinese character for tree. When the viewer stood on a marked point on the floor the calligraphy and the objects seen through the window overlapped, resulting in a conflation of text and objects.'