LANGUAGE, MEDIA AND CULTURE TRANSLATION IN XU BING’S WRITING-ART

En la era del arte contemporaneo global, la traducibilidad cultural, linguistica y mediatica de las obras de arte es esencial para llegar a publicos, instituciones artisticas y mercados artisticos transnacionalmente diversificados. La practica de la escritura-arte del artista contemporaneo chino Xu Bing, emigrante a los Estados Unidos y remigrante a China, ofrece amplios casos de estudio para discutir la importancia de la traduccion como metafora, practica y herramienta tecnica en las producciones artisticas globales. A partir del analisis de los happenings e instalaciones, entre ellos A Case Study of Transference(1994), Your Surname, Please(1998) y Book from the Ground(2014), este articulo investiga los intentos artisticos de Bing de reemplazar la traduccion linguistica con la transcodificacion de iconos con el objetivo de adaptarse a la “era pictografica” digital de la comunicacion visual global. La creacion de un sistema de iconos translinguisticos y transculturales en Book from the Groundse interpreta por tanto como un nuevo proyecto artistico de Babel, que proporciona una herramienta de traduccion visual universal en tiempos de transformacion digital. In the era of global contemporary art, the cultural, linguistic and media translatability of artworks is essential for reaching out to transnationally diversified publics, art institutions and art markets. The writing-art of the Chinese contemporary artist Xu Bing – an emigrant to the United States and remigrant to China – provides ample case studies for discussing the significance of translation as a metaphor, practice and technical tool for global artistic performances. Based on the analysis of happenings and installations, among them A Case Study of Transference (1994), Your Surname, Please(1998) and Book from the Ground (2014), the paper investigates Bing’s artistic attempts to replace linguistic translation by icon transcoding in order to adapt to the digital “pictographic age” of global visual communication. The creation of a translinguistic and transcultural icon design system in Book from the Ground  is interpreted as a new artistic Babel project, providing a universal visual translation tool in times of digital transformation.

digital visual writing space 4 seems natural. It is therefore not surprising that when digital technologies were appropriated by contemporary media art, East Asian artists often experimented with writing, typography and character design.
The work of the contemporary Chinese "script" artist Xu Bing is a case in point through which to study language, media and culture translation in globalized artistic contexts. Because of its translation-centered approach, it lends itself to reflection on the digital and global turn in the visual arts and media cultures -the transition from "the late age of print" 5 to the digital age, and the transcultural code-switching between different (art) languages and writing cultures in a globalizing art world.
The installations Your Surname Please (1998) and Book from the Ground (ongoing project since 2003) represent the turning points of these transitions, marking what Xu Bing himself has described as adaptations to the digital "pictographic age". 6 To understand the artistic attempts to replace linguistic translation by icon(ic) transcription, one has to look at the prehistory of experiments with writing within Xu Bing's oeuvre. The later digital experiments in the transcoding of written language can be 4 See Jay David Bolter (2001), Writing Space: Computers, Hyptertexts and the Remediation of Print, Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum. 5 This is the title of Ted Striphas (2009), The Late Age of Print. Everyday Book Culture from Consumerism to Control, New York: Columbia University Press. In the late 1980s, when Xu Bing was still living in China, his script works playfully experimented with the (typo)graphic design of Chinese characters, using the ideographic writing system to demonstrate from a particular Chinese perspective the excess and hyperbolism of the print/ing culture and its erosion of meaning in the late age of print. 6 Xu Bing (2007), Regarding Book from the Ground, http://www.moma.org/interactives/exhibitions/2007/automatic_update/subs_wrap per.php?section=xubing_interview.html (inactive link, last access 2015). This version of the text is slightly different from the later one of the same title published in Mathieu Borysevicz, ed. (2014). The Book About Xu Bing' On closer inspection, the union between the cultures turns out to be a farce and a fiction. The linguistic signs are already fragmented intraculturally, they appear as pure script and phonetic images that in fact negate a message-oriented conventional transference of meaning.
The signification and imprinting power of script is evaded by imprinting texts that are composed of freely invented Chinese characters and madeup English words. The newly configured Chinese characters derive from the Book from the Sky (1987)(1988)(1989)(1990)(1991) for which the artist had engraved 4000 arbitrarily composed characters into small squares of wood thus producing print letters or -more precisely -print characters as text modules. The resulting printed characters looked surprisingly unprinted, reminiscent of graphical, handwritten calligraphy, thus giving an ironic twist to printing as a means of typographic writing standardization. What remains is the materiality of the characters, the corporeality of script beyond its educational mission. The pigs do not care about the script culture, their instinct is not held back by the superficial layering, i.e. the texts imprinted onto their flesh, nor their  Originally, the work was created for the Spanish island of Las Palmas.
Using his square word calligraphy for producing New English Calligraphy, the artist wrote the -statistically most common -surnames of the island's inhabitants down, displayed the calligrams on a wall and digitally scanned them. The audience was invited to search for their surname in the computer database, print out a copy of their calligraphed surname and take it home. The installation reflects in its construction the multilayered process of "transwriting", showcasing the panels of calligraphy, computers, printers, desks and chairs. In later developed versions of Your Surname, Please, the potential for (inter)active participation in the trans-writing process was more pronounced, enabling viewers to type in their names in English letters on the keyboards of the computer stations and then become visual witnesses of how their typewriting was gradually transformed, or more precisely, transcribed into calligraphic pseudo-Chinese characters. Like in the first conceptual design of the work, they could then print out their "character" Although the Book from the Ground is an artistic project dedicated to rebuilding the destroyed "Tower of Babel", its creator Xu Bing is very serious and ambitious about its humanistic communicative goal, namely the design of a universal writing system that can be comprehended globally regardless of the linguistic and cultural background, including the educational level, of its "readers". Given this objective, the artist puts his project in line with the numerous historical attempts to create a universal script. He makes particular reference to the French philosopher Jean Douet who, in his essay "A Proposal to the King for a Universal Language" (1627), was one of the first language theoreticians to recognize the potential of the system of image recognition in Chinese character writing as a basic model for the design of a universal language.
In contemporary society, marked by the "ubiquity of the Internet and the The prehistory of the project shows clearly that it did not evolve from character creation, but from the collection of signs and symbols that "are already in use and have the ability to be easily recognized". 10 Interested in image recognition as a primary means of communication, Xu Bing began collecting airline safety cards which provided a variety of icons amounting to the comprehensibility of a universal language. He continued to expand his collection in 2003 when he saw icons on a chewing gum packet that explained how to throw it away after consumption, visualizing the message: "Please wrap the used gum and dispose of it into a trash bin." 11 He realized that "in addition to single icons used to explain something simple, several icons together can be used to narrate a longer story". 12 From that moment on, he began systematically and incessantly collecting symbols and icons. Whenever he saw a symbol or icon of communicative relevance, he took a photo or cut it out, and then pasted it into a booklet that functioned as a sort of dictionary of symbols. He collected logos, icons and insignia from across the globe and began researching the symbols of specialized fields such as mathematics, chemistry, physics, drafting, musical composition, choreography and corporate branding. The main goal of this investigative collection was to understand the core design elements and habits of visual communication. The main idea of the Book from the Ground is to constantly add on new symbols in order to keep pace with the discovery or coinage of new icons. Usually, the found-footage symbols and icons are graphically synthesized so that they appear as unicode signs. Nevertheless, the full spectrum of visual signs from signage, logo(gram)s, symbols, insignia, icons to pictograms is present.
The variety of visual sign types is not restricted to one standard category; it is only graphically harmonized to guarantee consistent recognition and readability. In order to extend the scope of pictographic meaning production, Xu Bing sometimes relies on the principles of Chinese character-construction such as the visuo-spatial composition of more than one character in an imaginary square used to configure a new word (or) concept. Similar to the Chinese character-construction of "forest"constructed by doubling the character for wood-, three car icons stacked together signify "bottleneck". A repetition of these composed signs based on multiplication along the pictographic writing line expresses a gridlock.
Point to Point, the first story of Book from the Ground, was written directly with icons (Fig. 4), after a first attempt to translate a Chinese (written) language draft for an amateur novel into icons had failed due to the difficulty of transferring the structural complexity of the language system. Also the complexity of the narrative had to be reduced, resulting in a simple 24-hour story about the daily life of a contemporary person living and working in a city -that of "Mr Black, from his waking up in the morning, going to the toilet, to his rushing to work, dealing with his demanding boss, drinking with friends, and surfing the internet in search of a girlfriend." 13 Although the content, message and thoughtfulness of the story is restricted, the global outreach of the book is almost limitless, since it can be read and understood by everybody "without the need of translation". 14 For Xu Bing, "the limitations of the book lie in your life experience, not in your educational level or geographic location." 15 It is the shared visual, physical and emotional experiences that allow for competent icon-reading.
Due to its linguistically non-translational foundation, the iconic writing system compiled for Book from the Ground can be turned into a global translation instrument. After writing a book to be universally understandable, Xu Bing has reprogrammed his self-composed universal icon-script system as a translation tool, facilitating the translation of written language into the pictogram system. He developed a "font library" computer program that enables users to type English or Chinese sentences and see them instantaneously translated into the new iconic writing. 16 Currently, this font library program is limited to English and Chinese, but in the future, it will include other major languages, thus rendering possible global communication through a translinguistic visual code. Xu Bing comments on this icon-translation potential of a universal script as follows: "[...] after our currently un-finished computer program is perfected, writers of every language will be placed on equal footing. To a certain extent, this software will function as a point of transfer between dissimilar languages. This early result should not be minimized because it has limitless potential to expand into even larger arenas. The relationship between our new language 14 Ibid. 15 Ibid. 16 The "font library" translation program sometimes produces bizarre, unexpected results. These reveal the imperfections of the program development and the lapses of mistranslation. and other, preexisting languages resembles the relationship between Mandarin and the many Chinese dialects: disparate pronunciations refer to identical characters. English cannot become a 'global language,' as its relationship with other languages is one of mutual exclusivity. As the use of English expands, other languages are lost. Michael Evamy states, 'for now, the world's peoples must either be addressed in their own language, or by non-verbal means.' In that respect, a pictographic language not reliant upon phonics has a special advantage. For the merchandising store (an idea of the curator), the artist had turned signs and symbols from Book from the Ground into practical consumer objects, such as t-shirts, umbrellas, books, dining tables and tableware, furniture, refrigerator-magnet sets, and chocolate. Exhibition visitors could shop the consumable icons inside a three-dimensional installation of a shop that spatially represented the symbol for "store".
With this concept-store installation, the artist and curator made clear