A Book from the Sky

A Book from the Sky (simplified Chinese: 天书; traditional Chinese: 天書; pinyin: Tiānshū) is the title of a book produced by Chinese artist Xu Bing in the style of fine editions from the Song and Ming dynasties, but filled entirely with meaningless glyphs designed to resemble traditional Chinese characters. The book, which consists of four volumes totaling 604 pages, was printed in a single print run of 126 copies between 1987 and 1991, and was first publicly exhibited in October 1988, in Beijing's China Art Gallery.

The work was originally titled Mirror to Analyze the World: The Century’s Final Volume (simplified Chinese: 析世鉴－世纪末卷; traditional Chinese: 析世鍳－世紀末卷; pinyin: Xī shì jiàn—Shìjì mòjuǎn), a title which “evokes the trope of the book as jian 鍳 or mirror in the venerable tradition of imperial historiography”. However, the artist eventually felt that this title was “cumbersome” and “heavily influenced by Western forms and the current cultural climate”, and decided to adopt the name that was already in popular use, Tiānshū. In Chinese, the term tiān shū (“divine writing”) originally referred to certain kinds of religious texts, but is now used to mean “gibberish”; it has thus been suggested that Nonsense Writing would be a more appropriate translation of the title.

The book is composed using a set of 4,000 characters, as this is roughly the number of characters in common usage in modern written Mandarin. These characters were designed on the basis of the Kangxi radicals, so that “in terms of density of strokes and frequency of occurrence, they… appear, on the page, to be real characters“. In addition to these, page and fascicle numbers were indicated using tally marks based on the Chinese character 正.

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