This is Tian Shu (天书) by Xu Bing (徐冰), often translated as Book from the Sky, but sometimes called Book from Heaven. It’s perhaps the most widely known contemporary work by a Chinese artist, so it’s a little mortifying that I only just discovered it this morning, reading about this and that in the Australian Journal of Anthropology.

Tian Shu, a modern art installation four years in the making (1987-1991), is comprised of a display of books spread in a large rectangle across the ground, above which voluptuous scrolls unroll in long, pregnant arcs. The books — four hundred of them — are handmade with reverential adherence to the standards of traditional Ming dynasty fonts, bookbinding, typesetting and stringing techniques. The fifty-foot scrolls are printed in the style of Chinese outdoor newspapers.

To make them, Xu painstakingly carved Chinese characters into square woodblocks, in just the way his ancient printing predecessors would have done, had them typeset and printed, and the printed pages mounted and bound into books and scrolls.

The result is a truly spectacular display of bookmanship — volumes fit for an emperor’s library.

Yet, there’s the astonishing, Borgesian catch:

Out of the three or four thousand Chinese characters used in these volumes and scrolls, not a single one of them is a real Chinese character.

They are made up of recognizable radicals and typical atomic components of Chinese characters, but Xu laboured to ensure that while they all retain the unmistakable look of Chinese script, they are all, so to speak, nonsense. They do not exist in any dictionary, and do not mean anything. Chinese speakers and non-Chinese speakers alike approach the books with the same sense of wonder at their beauty, and the same sense of incomprehension at their content — though, for Chinese readers, the frustrated impulse to read might detract somewhat from their aesthetic enjoyment of the art piece. I’ve heard that some Chinese readers have spent days attempting to locate a character they can read — to no avail. It’s a piece of art whose meaning is to be found in its meaninglessness.

Some twenty years later, in 2006, Xu Bing followed up on Tian Shu with another installation called Di Shu (地书) – literally, Book from the Ground, or Book from Earth. Where Tian Shu is understood by none, Chinese or non-Chinese speakers alike, Di Shu was composed to be understood by all, irrespective of their language and nation. As Xu himself says,

我的艺术多与文字有关，这是从二十年前的一部叫《天书》的作品开始的。称它为“天书”，因为它是一本包括我自己在内，世上没有人能读懂的书。现在我用这套 “标识语言”，又写了一本说什么语言的人都能读懂的书。我称它为《地书》。事实上，这两本书有共同之处 : 不管你讲什么语言，也不管你是否受过教育，它们平等地对待世界上的每一个人。

“I have created many works of art relating to language. This [piece of work - Di Shu ] has its origins in a piece I made twenty years ago, called Tian Shu. I called it Tian Shu because it it is a book legible to no one on this earth, including myself. Now I am using a “language of signs” to write a book that any speaker of any language can understand; I call it Di Shu. In truth, though, these two books have something in common: No matter what language you speak, or what level of education you have attained, they treat all people of this world equally.”

Whether from Heaven or Earth, both his art pieces — and in this way they are something of backhanded tributes to the written word — are to be understood (or not understood, in the case of the Tian Shu) by the educated and non-educated alike.

For me, amongst other things, Tian Shu is the purest veneration of the written word and the form of the book: not for the knowledge they contain and convey, but simply the very fact that they are, and that they are, or can be, so beautiful, without even reading a word, and even without meaning anything at all. This is, in short, bookporn at its most essential! Who among us has not walked into a bookstore or a library which contains not a single book one can read, but which nonetheless takes our breath away? Who has not been touched by beautiful calligraphy, by brushstroked words on fine paper, by sensuous lines of scripts that dance provocatively on the page, inviting comprehension? Beauty can move without language. Here is my internet Hat taken off to 徐冰先生. May he continue to frustrate the literate, create beautiful things, and do his bit for bookporn around the world.

Pictures from xubing.com and Google Images.

I thought it was about time I bookporned the place I’ve become attached to (in both senses of the word): the Institute of Southeast Asian Studies in Singapore, in all its vasty, lofty glory.

Its glory is not confined to the mere aesthetic; it is a place where a Southeast Asian specialist can dissolve quietly into a very special brand of ecstasy. Many historians know this ecstasy; Southeast Asian historians can only know it in very few circumstances. This ecstasy, roughly speaking, arises when one is reading a particularly obscure book on, say, Javanese religious rituals, and comes across a wildly seductive reference in the footnotes (you know! the ones that say coyly to you, via their long, explicit titles: “I will tell you everything you want to know”). One leaps out of the chair with a feral look in one’s eyes and dashes to the library catalogue, and pounds the search keywords in with animal desperation, with shaking hands….

In most libraries, the Southeast Asian historian stares in tearful rage at the ‘Search revealed no results, nearest holding is 3 billion miles away’, and sinks to one’s knees, weeping uncontrollably. In ISEAS library, one saunters, at most, two or three shelves down, extracts the obscure little tome from its place, and saunters back to one’s table, with aforementioned ecstasy oozing from every pore.

A word of caution: given the multitudinous nature of footnotes and references, this can result in one’s table breaking under the weight of the books you have brought back for yourself to follow up on, and can also cause brain failure and chronic depression as a consequence of trying to read all of them and realizing that you can never finish. Small price to pay for an awesome library.

Happy 2009!

Hanoi is without question, for me, the crazed, dirty, artsy, gutsy, eccentric capital and lifeblood of Southeast Asia. Take Paris. Grime down the buildings and filth the gutters; change all the signboards into Vietnamese; add a million streetside phở vendors, a million ardent touts, merchants and basket carriers, citywide communist broadcasts twice a day and three million motorbikes; remove all the traffic rules; and top the whole thing off with the best damned coffee in the world, on every street corner. Then you have Hanoi: labyrinthine, lawless, insane, and utterly glorious.

This bookstore was literally around the corner from where I stayed: Ethnic Travel, Insight Into Vietnam, it’s called, and somehow rises quite appropriately to its rather belaboured title:

It is a floor-to-ceiling wall of books, shuddering like jelly on the flimsiest and most skeletal bookshelf they could get away with. It might have been made of bamboo, and possibly toothpicks. The bookshop was being minded by a tiny, wide-eyed Vietnamese girl who spoke not a jot of English apart from “You buy now?” Tiny as she was, she trundled the precarious mobile front of the bookshelf back and forth across the room for us, picking up the books which, dislodged by the jerky motion of the shelf, tumbled out along the way, and stuffing them back into their places with total aplomb.

The bookstore sells and buys used books, specializes in travel guides, and is clearly aimed at the bewildered non-Vietnamese-speaking clutches of people who wander the streets of Hanoi, their alienness betrayed each time they flinch at the deranged traffic as they cross the road (locals navigate the sea of madness without so much as a flicker of the eyelid). Once inside, though, you could be in any used bookstore in the world, and only two things indicate you might in fact be Asia: the Buddhist altar discreetly commanding the only empty square of display space in the top corner of the room, and the presence of books like these slotted among the normal offerings:

A peek inside the book will reveal an extremely suspect, grainy, photocopied quality to the pages — not that you need anymore than ‘Slaugkternouse-Five’ on the spine to tell you that this book has not seen the inside of a kosher printing press in its entire lifetime. Piracy is alive and kicking, even if it no longer involves eyepatches and peglegs. Welcome to Southeast Asia.

I am not generally a complete sucker for gimmicks. BUT.

In Suntec City, a colossal, scrupulously modern shopping complex in Singapore, there lie the fruits of the labour of sheer genius. Behold, the Food Republic: a Singaporean hawker center made to look like a library.

This is clearly a ploy: it is a pernicious, utterly unholy conspiracy to make me spend all my time and money eating there, despite the fact that it is 45 minutes by bus from where I live, on the other side of the island, and despite the fact that everything selling there is about 20% more expensive than your standard hawker fare.

Authentic library lamps!!!!! 1 bazillion points for effort. The only thing that arrests my irrational lust, which mingles uncertainly with my more general lust for hawker food, is that the books are, alas, not real:

even when they are, in fact, three dimensional –

Still, is it too much to ask that more restaurants cater in similarly imaginative ways to the violently rapturous bibliophiles among us? If you live in Singapore, I exhort you to go. If you visit Singapore, I will escort you myself. Any excuse.

_{NB: This is a largely aesthetic experience. The food is not the best you can get in Singapore, but that’s not saying much, since it is, after all, Singapore. If you want real food, you want to visit Kuala Lumpur.}

the Singapore National Library is quite a marvel: steel and glass wrought into elegance manifest. It is much taller than its 16 storeys suggest, for each floor is lavish – positively indulgent – with its space. From certain angles on the outside it looks almost like bookshelves

from other angles, more like science fiction –

And what a building it is from the inside! Surely there can’t be many other public libraries that would place their rare books, untouchable collections and archive material on the very top two floors of the building, its research library on the next top five floors of the building, and the books for the masses in the basement? — Rather than the other way around, with the archive boxes squirrelled away into the dark, windowless basements that literally bury the researchers with the past, and the books for normal people out in the sunshine?

But in the Singapore National Library, as an academic researcher, you find yourself enticed – nay, positively obliged – into those lofty glass towers of scholarship. And you sit at vast desks that command such spectacular views over the city, and you wonder that perhaps it is only in Singapore, whose 43-year-old modern history is in many respects so scant and yet so hard-won, where the past is so literally elevated to such heights, and where its value to Singaporeans (and of course, to the Government) is made so utterly, architecturally explicit, in the way that they do best: corporately…

and now the Contraband:

I only got this one shot before being assaulted (quite politely, however) by the librarians. It’s the highest floor of the Lee Kong Chian Reference Library that can be accessed without permission, on the 11th floor – the Singapore (of course) and Southeast Asian collection, where I shall be spending much of my weekends in the coming weeks – and it is truly marvellous.

Islamic calligraphy comes in a bewildering, beautiful array of scripts. Copying the Qur’an is a sacred act, and — so I suppose — extreme calligraphic exertions are one way of demonstrating extreme piety. One of the most demanding scripts is the ghubar script — literally, “dust script” — and it requires that the scribe produce words that are as fine as hairs while still legible (on pain of eternal damnation, for distorting the Holy Book is a Mighty Sin). To an extent this sort of miniature writing had some actual functionality: sending long, compact messages to far-off lands by carrier pigeon, for example. But…

Behold, this fifteenth century Ottoman Turkish scroll, which resides on the third floor of the Asian Civilizations Museum in Singapore. It is astoundingly beautiful, and also crazy. There are two levels of wording on the scroll. The large Arabic letters, unravelling in perfect thulth script across the scroll, form a prayer, beginning with the invocation of Allah’s blessings on Muhammad, followed by the names of the twelve Shiite Imams and an invocation to ‘Ali. But those letters are shaped from smaller words: in fact, no less than the words of the entire Qur’an, painstakingly inscribed in tiny tiny ghubar script according to the design of the larger prayer (most certainly best viewed large):

Some scholars suggest that this sort of words-inside-words calligraphy carried particular appeal for Islamic mystics, for when they read out the larger (and briefer) text, it would be as if that single prayer contained within it the whole, unabridged word of God and His glory.

Personally, I think it’s 100% showing off. Also, 1 million % devastatingly awesome. I have never wanted to steal something so much in my life.

an excursion out into the Cambridge hinterlands yields a Find in the town of Saffron Walden: Lankester Antiques and Books, which is exactly what it says on the tin:

that is to say, a stacked and dangling jumble of curios, oddities and knick-knacks, hemmed in sternly by shelves of books — all seeming to tremble on the cusp of total chaos; and the proprietor buried in among the antique postcards, typewriters and first editions — the solemn center around which all this wonderful, mere anarchy turns.

better still is the fact that the jumble and chaos is contained within such prim, white order on the outside. here is a metaphor for Self, or somesuch…

This isn’t full-fledged bookporn; it’s something more coy, more demure. Maybe it’s like the difference between the feathered and sequined blond tarts grinding up against the dancing pole on stage, dollar bills spilling out of their cleavages … and the pretty brunette in t-shirt and jeans working behind the bar, who, when she turns around to pour your shot, has the hint of a thong peeking up over the top of her jeans –

– something like that, or perhaps, something not at all like that. after all, I am no good with analogies, and I wouldn’t want to call the Caius library a harlot. at any rate, I am back from the Baltic after an extended holiday, and hopefully, back to business.

this is totally overdue. While I was in the States a couple of months ago, I spent 8 days in Cornell University, otherwise known as the Mecca of Southeast Asian Studies, and discovered that the Kroch Library had the most prostitutional opening hours I’ve ever encountered — 7am to 2am, staffed throughout, and the beautiful, spacious library cafe stays open all the way, until I am dragged out of it, kicking and screaming, projected unceremoniously into the subzero night, and the doors of the library clang shut behind me. (Narrative embellishment probable).

coming home from that to my beloved Cambridge University Library (9 to 7 on weekdays, 9 to 5 on Saturday, and closed. on. Sundays.) felt like perdition.

At any rate, while wandering about in total reverence, I found the mezzanine floor of the Kroch, which allows one so inclined to lean over the balcony and gaze magisterially from one’s lofty vantage point across the vast steely expanse of metal shelving, books … one beholds a territory so ripe, lush and ready for exploitation that for a moment, one has a twang of longing for empire. Speaking personally, I would subjugate these masses any day.

a most excellent bookstore somewhere on Broadway, NYC, whose name I can neither remember nor decipher from the shopwindow. A glorious, crammed place! Wallspace and floorspace are colonized with equal vigour: books and DVDs line the slender, precarious staircase that dissects the shop down the middle; books are stuffed into every shelf crevice and occupy every available flat space; strange curios announce a proprietor’s eccentricity (the giant stuffed fish gives it away, really). There is even the occasional, atmospheric cobweb. In short, it has the narrow, musty feel of a shop which, were cosmic laws so inclined, might periodically squeeze slowly inward until it vanishes into another dimension, leaving bewildered patrons to stand outside, blinking in the sunshine and swearing to their friend that they were sure there had been a bookshop here just last week …