Quotation content:

Baa, baa, black sheep, Have you any wool Yes sir, yes sir, Three bags full;

One for my master, One for my dame, But none for the little boy who cries in the lane.

Nursery Rhymes Four Xu Bing

As the first modern Chinese artist to venture into the West, Xu Bing is without doubt one of the top artists in modern Chinese art. Born in the mid-1950's he grew up on the grounds of the Beijing University. After two years of re-education farm labor in Inner Mongolia he entered the Central Academy of Art's School of Print Making after passing the competitive examinations in 1977, then in 1990 he immigrated to the United States. Xu Bing's natural artistic talents and wealth of worldly experience inspired him to continually fuse new ideas into his art works. Using ancient Chinese characters as the foundation, he combined calligraphy, prints, woodcuts, printing, and installations behaviors into art, gradually creating his own conceptual art.

Xu Bing once spent four years carving 4000 pseudo-Chinese characters that sent shockwaves through the 1987 "Modern Chinese Art Exhibition" In 1989 he went on to use pseudo-characters in the printing of Sung style block print books, creating 100 sets of the "A Book from the Sky"which were presented at an altar-like exhibition (This work was later renamed "A Book from the Sky". This drew the attention of the international contemporary art world to China's artistic expression. Between 1994 and 1996 Xu Bing went on to link the 26 letter English alphabet to Chinese radicals, turning English words into individual Chinese characters and creating a unique new style of English calligraphy. To make it easy for people to learn how to write English block letters, he even printed the "Basics of New English Calligraphy"which was exhibited in over thirty countries around the world. The exhibition halls were laid out as classrooms so people could learn how to write New English Calligraphy with brushes. This "New Language"?broke down barriers between language and culture, changing people's perceptions and overcoming their cultural differences at the most basic level - their written language. In 1999 Xu Bing was made a MacArthur Fellow, the highest cultural award in the United States. This honored his important contributions to society through his innovations in calligraphy and block printing. The New English Calligraphy certainly played an important part in this award.

This work "Nursery Rhyme Four: Black Sheep"was created by Xu Bing by transliterating into New English Calligraphy a traditional English nursery rhyme. The nursery rhyme (in one version) goes: "Baa, baa, black sheep have you any wool? Yes sir, yes sir, three bags full. One for my master, one for my dame, but none for the little boy who cries in the lane." With this quaint English nursery rhyme expressed in the form of Oriental Chinese characters, even as the audience is able to experience the fusion of Western and Oriental culture from a whole new perspective, they also gain a deeper understanding into Xu Bing's declaration that: "A great artist is not about you recognizing an important theme, but in what artistic language you use to express the concept you had understood. This artistic language must be a special and completely new way of expression.