Arts Madness 2025 and Xu Bing | A Book from the Sky

Around 1040 CE Bi Sheng invented the first known moveable type system. Skipping ahead a few hundred years, the artist Xu Bing created Book from the Sky as a monumental print. It is probably among the most ambitious, labor-intensive, and useless books ever to be printed in China or anywhere else. He created 4,000 unique characters on wood blocks to print this massive "book" but while those characters look like Chinese writing, they are actually completely meaningless.

A Book from the Sky is one of the required artworks for AP Art History. Check out my Spotify playlist, AP Art History Cram Session to learn about other artists and artworks from that curriculum.

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