High Life

HIGH LIFE 35 “They challenge the slothful minds of viewers. In the search for new grounds and ways of interpretation, they open up a wider, untapped cognitive space in viewers, putting themonalert against language and leading them to rediscover the primary sources of cognition. This is howmy ‘characters’ work. Xu Bing on creativity “I returned to the city after the Cultural Revolution was over. I read whatever books fell my way and perused translation works of Western theories like many others. But all the readings made my thoughts unclear and I felt like something was lost. It’s like a starving man whose stomach hurts after eating too much all at once. Then I decided to make a book of my own to express this feeling. “So I shut myself up in a small room and began to carve Book from the Sky (Xu’s book filled with glyphs designed to resemble Chinese characters)which is full of characters no one understands, including myself. It took around one year and I felt very comfortable doing it. When inventing and carving those fake characters that no one would understand, the touch of the knife and the fresh wood made me feel that I was really making progress. “I later discovered that a person’s motivation for creation and life itself is to constantly look for such a special time period inwhich to do something special, to devote your life to this period to create so as to obtain a sense of presence and enrichment. “It doesn’t matter what you do – it’s fine if it is not art – but the thing you do should be worth doing and be something no one has done before. It should also benefit society and be creative. These are my basic requirements.”