"It's very interesting because in my own life, I'm very private and low-key. For my work it's just the opposite; I want to be involved with the audience and society. My work, actually, is not art for art's sake; it's more on the cultural side and the way you talk about culture can extend to politics,
As a young man, Xu Bing developed an odd relationship to language. The son of a professor and a librarian, he spent his early years surrounded by books that he could not read. His school years coincided with the Cultural Revolution, when he and other children were sent off to camps to learn Mao's new