Book from the Ground: from point to point (Mit Press)

A book without words, recounting a day in the life of an office worker, told completely in the symbols, icons, and logos of modern life.Twenty years ago I made Book from the Sky, a book of illegible Chinese characters that no one could read. Now I have created Book from the Ground, a book that anyone can read.Xu BingFollowing his classic work Book from the Sky, the Chinese artist Xu Bing presents a new graphic novelone composed entirely of symbols and icons that are universally understood. Xu Bing spent seven years gathering materials, experimenting, revising, and arranging thousands of pictograms to construct the narrative of Book from the Ground. The result is a readable story without words, an account of twentyfour hours in the life of Mr. Black, a typical urban whitecollar worker.Our protagonists day begins with wakeup calls from a nearby bird and his bedside alarm clock; it continues through toothbrushing, coffeemaking, TVwatching, and catfeeding. He commutes to his job on the subway, works in his office, ponders various fastfood options for lunch, waits in line for the bathroom, daydreams, sends flowers, socializes after work, goes home, kills a mosquito, goes to bed, sleeps, and gets up the next morning to do it all over again. His day is recounted with meticulous and intimate detail, and reads like a postmodern, posttextual riff on James Joyces account of Blooms peregrinations in Ulysses. But Xu Bings narrative, using an exclusively visual language, could be published anywhere, without translation or explication; anyone with experience in contemporary lifeanyone who has internalized the icons and logos of modernity, from smiley faces to transit maps to menuscan understand it.