“My generation has a very awkward relationship with words and books,” one of the best-known contemporary Chinese artists, Xu Bing, said in a recent interview. His parents worked at Beijing University, and he spent considerable time in the library: Before he could read, he was already very familiar with books as desirable objects. “By the time of the Cultural Revolution, I could read, but there weren’t any books available. The entire country read only one book: Mao’s ‘Little Red Book.’ We read and memorized that book all day. At the end of the Cultural Revolution, I returned from the countryside to Beijing to study. Because I was starving for culture and was in the midst of a general cultural fever at the time, I read many different types of books.”

Mr. Xu’s experience goes a long way toward explaining the significance of the book in contemporary Chinese art and why the China Institute would mount “Shu: Reinventing Books in Contemporary Chinese Art,” the second part of which opened yesterday and runs through February 24, 2007. With 18 works on view, the show takes the book as a theme, thus providing us with a compact introduction to an artistic culture that, in recent years, has garnered significant interest both in the art world and the marketplace.

As the curator, Wu Hung, who is the Harrie A. Vanderstappen distinguished professor of art history at the University of Chicago, points out in the catalog, Maoist suppression is not the only reason why books figure so often in recent Chinese art. There is also a long scholarly, intellectual history among Chinese artists, one condensed into the maxim “Read thousands of books, travel thousands of miles,” a phrase that originated with the neo-Confucian scholar Liu Yi (1017–1086), but which continues to have currency.

Whether intended or not, the phrase seems to have functioned as a literal injunction for “Wako: Japanese Pirates of the Middle Ages” (1995), an installation by Cai Guo-Qiang, who is probably the most famous Chinese artist now living in America. The work memorializes a failed project in which he intended to sail from Quanzhou, his hometown, to Taiwan, Korea, and Japan, gathering rocks carved with local definitions of the word wokou (which in Chinese refers to Japanese pirates). Ultimately, political obstacles scuttled the trip.

What results is a group of rocks the artist collected from the countries on his itinerary, each with a local dictionary definition of the word written calligraphically in black ink. Around the rocks are ink-brush paintings on an accordion-style folded book, illustrating a story with delicacy and grace.

Mr. Cai incorporates a picture book as part of his installation, but the book takes many forms here. Liu Dan, who lives in New York, contributes a 7-foot-by-10-foot watercolor of an open book. Called “Dictionary” (1991), it is a stunning, though literally unreadable, realist painting.

Unfortunately, because it is under glass one can’t flip through “A Self-Portrait Book” (2003) either. Put together by Qin Siyuan, who was born in Scotland and lives in Beijing, it consists of photographic details of the artist’s body printed on traditional Chinese paper and bound in a traditional Chinese manner. The displayed pages juxtapose the crinkled landscape of what appears to be a palm with a close-up of a reddened eye.

Among the most visually striking of the works included are the sculptural interpretations of books. Six gray men, cast in fiberglass, squat on bundles of books in “Garbage Dump” (2005–06) by Yue Minjun, who lives in Beijing. Naked, the identical gray men smile somewhat menacingly, while the books all come from places where one can purchase trash items — as the artist puts it, a reference to the “cultural garbage present in modern society.” Wei Guangqing, who lives in Wuhan, makes powerful relief sculptures of books from papier mâché, the pages of which combine numbers, writing, expressionistic figures, and found objects into beautiful and politically pointed images.

The ink and pencil drawings, from the period between 1972 and 1976, during the Cultural Revolution, collected in hand-bound books by the Vancouver-based Gu Xiong, have perhaps more historical interest than artistic originality. But they are fascinating nonetheless.

Mr. Xu’s own contribution, “Tobacco Project” (2000), explores the mutability of the book as well as the role of the cigarette in modern Chinese history. In the installation, he displays Tang poems printed on cigarette papers bound into accordion books, cigarettes designed after Mao’s favorite brand and printed with sayings from the chairman, a calendar book made from American Spirit packages, and other objects.

The Western art world tends to focus such highly conceptual works as those by Messrs. Xu and Cai, in part, one imagines, because they so often combine the didactic with the aesthetic, as in the “Tobacco Project.” The successful strategy embraced in “Shu” turns the idea-within-art notion inside out, by exhibiting beautiful, and sometimes diverting, artworks within a context of cultural exchange. With their unfamiliar pleasures, looking at these books is like traveling thousands of miles.

Until February 24 (125 E. 65th St., between Lexington and Park avenues, 212-744-8181).