Xu Bing is one of today's most internationally renowned contemporary Chinese artists. At the 2010 Shanghai Expo, his two large-scale installations titled "Phoenix Project" were not only the largest artwork on display, but met with an overwhelmingly positive response from critics and visitors. Xu has been a creative artist for more than 30 years, and his name appeared in art history textbooks as early as the 1990s. His work is part of the collections of numerous international museums and galleries, including the British Museum and the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York.

A long-term resident of New York and a trademark name in the global art market, Xu in 1999 received a MacArthur Foundation Genius Award, one of the most prestigious cultural prizes in the United States, for "his originality, creativity, and capacity to contribute importantly to society." Furthermore, in recognition of his contributions to Asian culture, he was awarded the 2003 Fukuoka Asian Culture Prize, and in 2004 was given the first Wales International Visual Art Prize, Artes Mundi. More accolades soon came the Chinese artist's way, including the 2006 Southern Graphics Council Printmaking Lifetime Achievement Award.

This lot, the super-size work "Landscript", is from 2004, the same year that Xu, together with 15 other international artists, was featured in Art in America magazine's "People in Review" column, signifying his status as an innovative and influential trailblazer.

As its name indicates, "Landscript" shows a landscape made up out of Chinese characters, a typical setup for Xu Bing. At first glance, one has the impression of a free-hand brushwork painting in the classical Chinese style, but a closer observation reveals that instead of conventional brush-strokes, the elements of the scenery are in fact composed of pictographic Chinese characters carrying connotations such as "mountain," "cloud," "rock," "grass," or "leaf." Moreover, there is an assortment of faux characters invented by the artist. Together, the "real" and "bogus" scripts merge into a natural vista with a considerable undertow of irony and even mockery: on the surface, the painting might be seen as an epitome of the ancient Chinese aesthetic axiom that painting and calligraphy are just two sides of the same coin. Yet Xu's approach pushes this idea to the point where the concrete and the abstract begin to overlap in a confusing way. In revealing how writing can be used to convey meaning, but also create distance, he exposes the fragile nature of perception and communication. The pictographic or ideographic nature of some of the more basic Chinese characters may allow their meaning to be guessed even by the uninitiated, but most characters are the result of a long and complex evolution, and by no means easily understood.

Ever since 1977, when he enrolled at the Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing, Xu's development as an artist has been intimately intertwined with "script" and "writing," as even a cursory look at his oeuvre will confirm; titles such as "Book from the Sky", "New English Calligraphy", "Cultural Animal", or this lot, "Landscript", speak for themselves. And indeed, they all share a common origin in concepts and conceptualizations of "characters." As Xu puts it, "My work invariably possesses a clue implying an attitude—skeptical of prevailing beliefs. Why do we use characters? Characters are the most basic element of human cultures. To reform characters is to reform the most basic substance of human thinking."

Hidden in the panoramic view of this lot are lines of characters, which read, "The clouds are white. The clouds ... today I revisited this Mountains, all those distant impressions. Yesterday I was close to death, and the memories are blurry, but the sketches I've done over the past 30 years are right before my eyes, the sketchbooks right here in my hands. I love this kind of Northern Mountains. Some crops grow on this land, but I can't tell what they are. They're probably beans, because beans are the only thing that will grow in a place like this. Beans are very drought-hardy, just like the people of this land." During the Great Cultural Revolution, Xu was sent to the countryside for "reeducation," and while doing forced labor and participating in the "art for the masses" movement, he also used the opportunity to practice his sketching skills. Sketching from life has a long tradition in China, and Xu is very much at home in this genre. In 1999, he went to the Kiasma Museum of Contemporary Art in Finland for the "Landscripts from the Himalayan Journal" project, which focused on sketching from nature, and capturing the essence of landscapes, through close observation and a return to cultural specifics in the creative process. "Landscript" is a concrete manifestation of this approach, both a sweeping survey and culmination of the long-standing Chinese tradition of blending poetry, calligraphy and painting into one.