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Although XU Bing's book bound with yarn resembles a classic Chinese
book, it is illegible. While it is printed in characters that do not
exist, it is appealing because the characters appear bona fide to
the casual observer. One can only smile at the artist's useless effort
in creating 4,000 "new" Chinese characters. To Japanese
who have adopted Chinese characters into their own language, this
work might seem rather perplexing. In more recent works, the artist
has developed a way of representing the Alphabet in a set of what
appears to be Chinese characters, and is using this inverted system
of converting European writings into Chinese character writings.
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