There are only so many ways to subvert the language. No matter how hard we try, meaning keeps springing to the fore. When we read nonsense verse, it amuses because it plays variations on a tacit sense. In Lewis Carroll’s “Jabberwocky” we smile at “twas brillig, and the slithy toves / Did gyre and gimbel in the wabe …” Though this is nonsensical, the invented words stand in the subliminal shadows of actual words; it’s the way they’re skewed, and made weirdly multivocal, that prompts our pleasure. The Dadaists tried to abolish meaning entirely. German poet Hugo Ball’s “Seahorses and Flying Fish” begins, “tressli bessli nebogen Leila,” and concludes with the ringing line, “fasch kitti bimm.” This we consign at once to the category of playful piffle. Our sense of language remains unshaken.

Such is not the case with the work of the contemporary Chinese artist Xu Bing whose most controversial project, titled “Book From the Sky” (“Tianshu” in Chinese), manages to destabilize several millennia of literary culture. He does this, interestingly enough, not by demolition but by radical refinement; unlike so many of our own would-be innovators in the arts, Xu (pronounced “Shu”) Bing doesn’t seek to abolish the past but to elaborate and complicate it to fantastic and well-nigh maniacal lengths.

Steeped in traditional Chinese calligraphy, of which he is a recognized master, Xu Bing painstakingly created some 4,000 new, but meaningless, characters as the building blocks of his project. All of these characters look like Chinese; formed of radicals and phonetic components in conformity with immemorial practice, and written according to the long-established sequential rules that dictate the order of the brush or pen strokes that form each genuine character, Xu Bing’s creations could very well be Chinese characters. Certainly they are beautiful enough. But their beauty, coupled with their meaninglessness, has proved deeply unsettling, especially to Chinese viewers of Xu Bing’s installations and artifacts.

The complex impact of his work, as well as its considerable intricacy, comes through clearly in “Persistence/Transformation: Text as Image in the Art of Xu Bing” (Princeton University Press, 131 pages, $24.95), edited by Jerome Silbergeld and Dora C.Y. Ching. Don’t be misled by the book’s drab academic title. This is a fascinating – and exquisitely produced – volume. The 59 plates illustrating Xu Bing’s work within the vast context of Chinese tradition – which include many examples of rare calligraphic masterpieces from the past – are simply wonderful, and you don’t need to read Chinese to appreciate their loveliness.

Of course, illiteracy in Chinese may be an advantage in approaching Xu Bing’s work; most of us will be untroubled by the clash of clarity and illegibility in his texts. But for Chinese readers, the effect is shocking. Why is this so? As the various essays in the volume make plain, the written language has for centuries conferred a cultural unity on the ethnic and linguistic diversity of China; written Chinese is the same for speakers of Mandarin or of Cantonese or of any of the many regional dialects. And when communication breaks down, the speaker of one dialect may trace a written character on his palm to make his meaning clear to the speaker of another. Beyond this, the written language has come over millennia to embody “Chineseness.” To learn the 4,000 characters needed for literacy – the same number, not coincidentally, in Xu Bing’s invented script – children must spend many hours learning the prescribed sequence of strokes (the sequence in writing characters is crucial and underlies the arrangement of Chinese dictionaries; without knowing the order of the strokes, one cannot look up an unknown word). To create new characters that follow all the ancient rules yet prove empty of meaning seems a mockery. One Chinese visitor to Xu Bing’s installation of “Book From the Sky” in Pittsburgh in 2001 remarked angrily, “Xu Bing is not Chinese!”

To make matters even more provocative, Xu Bing presents his characters in the guise of ancient texts: hand-printed, bound in thread, ensconced in carved wooden boxes, four to a set, like some precious classic from the Tang dynasty. By contrast, in his installations of “Book From the Sky” – first mounted in Beijing in 1988, much to the outrage of Communist Party officials, and since then in many venues – the viewer is surrounded, if not engulfed, by the spurious texts in the form of meticulously printed pages, scrolls, and carved wooden blocks suspended from the ceilings and the walls. All have the appearance of “exalted texts” from time immemorial, but all are devoid of intelligible meaning.

An unexpected impetus to Xu Bing’s work came inadvertently from those who would most oppose it. During the infamous Cultural Revolution, when he was a student, a movement was promulgated to simplify written Chinese. As Xu Bing is quoted in the book as saying, “In one semester we learned a lot of characters, a lot of new words, but the next semester the teacher will say that the government published a new way to write certain characters, so you need to learn more. So maybe the next semester the teacher will say again that the government has published another 100 new words. Some new words from last semester won’t work anymore. … That really confused us about the culture.” The experience rattled him; before, like most Chinese, he had believed in the immutable importance of the word “like it was made by the sky or by nature.”

I cannot help wondering whether this childhood glimpse into the fundamental arbitrariness of human language didn’t lead Xu Bing, years later, to attempt, not to subvert or mock classical Chinese, but to create, brushstroke by brushstroke, radical by radical, a form of writing beyond the vagaries of regimes and systems. To me, unable to read Chinese, his characters look abstract, yet even I can sense that the ghosts of possible meanings hover about them; they are not mere exercises in form. Beyond poetry as well as propaganda, they float in their beauty in an impossible realm uncontaminated by meaning.

eormsby@nysun.com