Borrowed Bodies, Native Tongues: Xu Bing’s Animalworks

Meiling Cheng argues that there is a conceptual turn in Xu Bing’s work associated with his use of animals since the 1990s. After Book from the Sky, Xu’s intercultural sensitivity shifted from using pseudo-scripts to incorporating animals in his discussions of the language system, counterfeit culture, and issues in the humanities. Animals are used to problematize the boundary between the cultural other and the self.