Born in Chongqing, Sichuan, Xu Bing enrolled at the Beijing Central Academy of Fine Arts in 1977, receiving an M.F.A. in 1987. Book from the Sky (天書) was first seen in 1988. Responses to the work ranged from enthusiastic endorsement to political suspicion. Most viewers saw it as a clever repudiation of Chinese literature, history, and government—and an affront to Chinese pride as having the world’s longest continuous writing system. The book was recognized as a landmark of twentieth-century art, and it launched his international reputation. For viewers literate in Chinese, the impulse to read it was frustrating, creating a tension between the seemingly familiar and the unexpectedly foreign. In his work, Xu questions the idea of conveying meaning through language. Chinese writing requires a combination of semantic and phonetic elements to form characters. With unused combinations, Xu carved four thousand pseudo-characters into pear-wood printing blocks to create movable type, a Chinese invention dating back to 220 C.E. He then printed and bound the volumes using traditional methods, a process that took four years. Xu once said, “China right now is so inspirational, so experimental a place. It gives you momentum and energy to think.”