Chinese words take on a deeper meaning at Xu Bing's fascinating exhibition, May Zhou reports in Houston, Texas.

More than 50 important works — woodcut prints, videos, drawings, installations — that represent renowned Chinese artist Xu Bing's incredible achievements over more than 40 years — are on display at the Asia Society Texas Center.

Titled Xu Bing: Word Alchemy, the exhibition took a year to assemble and will continue until mid-July. It's primarily funded by the Texas Commission on the Arts, a state agency.

Xu, who currently divides his time between Beijing and New York, has won many prestigious awards including the Medal of the Arts from the US State Department, according to exhibition curator Owen Duffy.

He has displayed his works in numerous prestigious venues around the world, such as the Museum of Modern Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Guggenheim Museum, the National Museum of Asian Art and the British Museum.

The Houston exhibition especially focuses on the theme of words and language, "which is absolutely foundational to understanding Xu Bing's practice", says Duffy.

In a one-day-long symposium on Feb 23, the Asia Society Texas Center invited eight curators from around the country to explore some of Xu's significant works with the artist himself presenting a keynote speech at the end.

"Each of Xu's unique art installations, in any of the various mediums he works with, pushes us to confront the limitations of our routine ways of seeing and interpreting what we see, or what we think we see," says Jan Stuart, curator of Chinese Art at the National Museum of Asian Art.

"What Xu Bing does is to take our routine patterns of thought, and he smashes them open with a sledgehammer. He's the one who breaks the cognitive structures in our way, breaks that obstacle to liberate us through his art," Stuart says.

Xu says many of his artworks have been about words, but it wasn't until years later when he looked back that he wondered why he had been so fascinated by them.

As the only living hieroglyphic language today, Chinese characters — square words — are unique and different compared to all other living languages in the world, says Xu.

With the advent of the computer age, people gradually realized that Chinese characters have played the role of a beneficial and centric gene in the development of human civilization, Xu says.

To Xu, Chinese characters act to regulate and compensate human civilization. "It functions like a contrarian that keeps civilization balanced going forward by constantly questioning it."

His animation work, The Character of Characters, which is included in the Asia Society exhibition, is about "how Chinese characters work in our brain to discern the world is different from other people", Xu says.

Chinese habitually use four-character idioms to communicate. "We like to express complicated things in a carefully arranged fashion," Xu says. "We consider the arranged order as something cultured, different from nature or unordered things."

As a result, symbols are very important in Chinese culture, Xu says. "For example, in Chinese opera, it's one symbol after another telling a story. A hand gesture or a backstep all represent something particular.

"So, my work talks about the uniqueness of Chinese characters and their influence on Chinese culture. What China has become today is inherently related to the form of Chinese characters. The strong visual component of Chinese characters provides a channel for artists to understand the unique characteristics of Chinese culture."

Besides the long history of Chinese characters, Xu says the popular "big character posters" during the "cultural revolution" (1966-76) had a profound impact on Chinese contemporary art, including his own.

Xu also had the unique opportunity to browse rows and rows of books growing up because his mother was working in the library of Peking University.

"There were all sorts of books about the history of printing, typeface design, special editions and such. Although I was too young to read the words, I became familiar with the appearance of the books and characters."

That experience planted something in Xu's consciousness. "The form and function of words and books can be two separate parts. The function of words is a tool used widely and secularly. Anyone can use words to say the best of things or the worst of things. To me, the appearance of words carries more cultural significance."

Xu says his first major work, The Book from Sky, removes the Chinese characters' worldly function and retains its pure visual appearance. "In a way, Chinese calligraphy is about dressing up the Chinese character to its most beautiful appearance. Most of my work utilizes the appearance of words," Xu says.

In The Book from Sky, Xu created 4,000 words consisting of elements of real Chinese characters that don't exist. The characters were then carved into wood, printed onto monumental sheets and into a book format that resembles the style of the Song Dynasty (960-1279).

First displayed in 1987 in Beijing, this work earned Xu international recognition and remains one of his most iconic artworks.

Xu later created another work, The Book from the Ground, which recounts a day in the life of an office worker by using symbols, icons, and logos of modern life without a single word. He thinks that symbols, such as emojis, can express some thoughts and emotions that our formal languages are unable to express.

"Contrary to The Book from Sky that nobody understands, The Book from the Ground is universal and can be understood by anyone in the world."

"Landscript" is another major category of Xu's work that is on display, in which Xu paints landscapes with words or sentences in calligraphic form. "In the tradition of the Chinese literati, poetry, calligraphy and painting are integrated as one. My work takes this concept a step further," Xu says.

Xu's Square Word Calligraphy works are also on display. When Xu first visited the US in the 1990s, he designed a new calligraphic system that fuses the English and Chinese languages. In this system, English words visually resemble the square format and form of Chinese characters.

Commissioned by the Asia Society Texas Center, Xu debuts a new Square Word Calligraphy piece consisting of the lyrics of Deep in the Heart of Texas, a song written in 1941 and considered an unofficial Texas state anthem.

Xu's other acclaimed works on display include: Mustard Seed Garden Landscape Scroll, which creates a landscape using illustrations from The Mustard Seed Garden Painting Manual of Painting to reveal the schematized nature of Chinese painting and The Background Story: Autumn Colors on the Qiao and Hua Mountains, which renders a famous historical artwork through image projection with various discarded items.

In response to questions from the audience, Xu discussed the role of art in general and in the age of AI.

Xu says art is about expressing something that we don't have a clear answer for. "The advancement of human civilization primarily depends on science, reasoning and logic, but art is necessary to disrupt the established order and arrangement. Art is about un-schematizing our schematized understanding of society and culture," Xu says.

While some artists are nervous that AI might replace art and artists, Xu says he sees a positive aspect from the technology, "because it makes us rethink what art is" and "the intervention of new technology and data allows us to discern more closely what art is and what technique is".

The emergence of AI makes art more important, Xu says. "Our technology is advancing too fast, and we have to have something to question such development, and the only thing that can question technology and cannot be replaced by it is this little bit of art in our lives."