Xu Bing - melding language and art

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Should you have the general good fortune to find yourself in the vicinity of the heavenly Ashmolean Museum in Oxford, dash with all speed towards the Xu Bing exhibition. If there is no possibilty of getting anywhere close, the miracle of the internet will bring art to you: http://jameelcentre.ashmolean.org/xu_bing

Xu Bing explores the interaction between language and the objects it represents. As we know, a word has specific, personal and cultural dimensions. Xu Bing plays with adapting pictograms so they represent both the shape of and the character for natural objects. The exhibition left me questioning the ways in which language is both sufficient and unsatisfactory when we try to describe our environments.

Worth more than one visit!

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