A Book from the Sky

[4]: 67  However, the artist eventually felt that this title was "cumbersome" and "heavily influenced by Western forms and the current cultural climate",[2]: 57  and decided to adopt the name that was already in popular use, Tianshu.

[2]: 46, 58  (This was one of the last remaining traditional printing factories in China, which after the Cultural Revolution mainly produced state-sponsored reprints of classical texts using pre-Revolution woodblocks.

[2]: 59 ) Later, workers at the factory typeset the pages by referring to a "model book" prepared by Xu, which contained symbols such as ↓★○☒❖ that had been placed in a one-to-one correspondence with his 4,000 pseudo-Chinese characters.

[4]: 65  However, according to Xu, his main purpose was to "expose the fact that Chinese literary culture is 討厭 taoyan", a term professor John Cayley translates as 'boring' or 'tedious' in ironic comparison to the process of making the book itself.

[8]: 17  In later works such as Square Word Calligraphy and Book from the Ground, Xu takes this idea further by subverting the logographic nature of the Chinese script in ways that make it broadly accessible.