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Abstract
The works of contemporary artists Xu Bing, Ed Pien and Gu Xiong are involved in bringing to light some of the factors inherent in social, cultural and linguistic translation. In doing so, each artist is also engaged in the nuanced activity of moving between historical and contemporary aesthetic strategies in order to interrogate the way meaning is produced through materials-based iterations, against a backdrop of public culture. This essay situates the works of Xu Bing, Ed Pien and Gu Xiong in relation to each artist's own respective practice which has spanned more than twenty years. Concentrating specifically on projects where the artists mobilize Western-influenced art methodologies and refer to traditional Chinese/Asian art styles, the essay makes canny revelations about the nature of communication, and on linguistic and material translation, in contemporary culture in the globalizing world.
Prologue
On any given day, a journey on public transit through an urban center in North America offers encounters that require acts of social reading and engagements with social translation. Young hipsters, bearing tattoos, wear get-ups that could become ready fodder for a treatise on the semiotics of self-presentation. And citizens from differing generations and ethnic backgrounds manifest signs of their cultures on their bodies and through their speech so that before our eyes the city bus becomes a theater of social understanding and misunderstanding at once.
In one such recent circumstance that I encountered, a literal reading of what was written on the body of another passenger became a cipher for the complexities of linguistic and cultural translation in the globalized world. A young woman was wearing a seemingly fashionable t-shirt that bore a glittering slogan: "Your smile my happy." Very likely, the girl was aware of the generalized fashion codes to which her t-shirt subscribed, but was possibly less cognizant of the nuances of the textual code-written English-that had been used to mark the garment. In that instance, I speculated on the background that might have brought the young woman and the ill-phrased t-shirt together, (was she an immigrant whose knowledge of English did not allow her full understanding of what the slogan meant?); and on the route of language and culture that had contrived to generate the text, (had the shirt been produced in...