A book without words, recounting a day in the life of an office
worker, told completely in the symbols, icons, and logos of modern
life. Twenty years ago I made Book from the Sky, a book of
illegible Chinese characters that no one could read. Now I have
created Book from the Ground, a book that anyone can read. -Xu Bing
Following his classic work Book from the Sky, the Chinese artist Xu
Bing presents a new graphic novel-one composed entirely of symbols
and icons that are universally understood. Xu Bing spent seven
years gathering materials, experimenting, revising, and arranging
thousands of pictograms to construct the narrative of Book from the
Ground. The result is a readable story without words, an account of
twenty-four hours in the life of "Mr. Black," a typical urban
white-collar worker. Our protagonist's day begins with wake-up
calls from a nearby bird and his bedside alarm clock; it continues
through tooth-brushing, coffee-making, TV-watching, and
cat-feeding. He commutes to his job on the subway, works in his
office, ponders various fast-food options for lunch, waits in line
for the bathroom, daydreams, sends flowers, socializes after work,
goes home, kills a mosquito, goes to bed, sleeps, and gets up the
next morning to do it all over again. His day is recounted with
meticulous and intimate detail, and reads like a postmodern,
post-textual riff on James Joyce's account of Bloom's
peregrinations in Ulysses. But Xu Bing's narrative, using an
exclusively visual language, could be published anywhere, without
translation or explication; anyone with experience in contemporary
life-anyone who has internalized the icons and logos of modernity,
from smiley faces to transit maps to menus-can understand it.
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