Xu Bing : Art Beyond the Kármán Line installation view at Red Brick Art Museum
If Space Art defines an art form that depicts and explores space through imagination, in painting or using digital media, astronautical art determines an art that seeks to interact directly with outer space. It is a current which saw its first beginnings in the early 1970s and 1980s with artists like Albert Notarbartolo, Tom van Sant, James McShane, Pierre Comte and the rocket inventor and space engineer Frank Malina (a close friend of both Théodore von Kármán and Qian Xuesen). This first generation of astronautical artists worked with projects that focused on the artwork in space. Since then there has of course been others like Tavares Strachan, Nahum and Trevor Paglen.
Xu Bing ，2020—2021 © Xu Bing Studio
Preparation before the launching of “Xu Bing Tianshu” Rocket © Xu Bing Studio
However, Xu Bing Book from the Sky (Xu Bing Tianshu) changed this context and astronautical art in its foundations, since the previous artists never considered the rocket as a part of the work but only as a vehicle to transport artworks into outer space as a simple art shipment to the exhibition site. Xu Bing on the other hand with his artistic awareness of detail, of distinction and process, seeing and appreciating the significant, understood that art is not only an object but something more inclusive. He conceived as such for the first time in history the rocket itself, its operations and entire process, as a contemporary artwork with multiple faces, something which of course was significantly different from what had been done previously. With his radical and methodical mindset Xu Bing changed astronautical art by understanding the meaning, essence and possible scope of its various articulations. That it was impossible to leave out the means and its process from the actual artwork, that the rocket with all its meanings was a signifier, which naturally and for all obvious reasons had to be included as a full and integral part of the piece.
Xu Bing : Art Beyond the Kármán Line installation view at Red Brick Art Museum
In transforming the rocket into an artwork, incorporating all of its different parts, functions and operations; its body, launch, thrusts, stages, land traces, satellite, the surrounding spacescape as well as the piece intended to stay in orbit beyond the Karman line, the Tianshu Magic Cube, Xu Bing gave a total perspective of what astronautical art could be. The rocket is used in its entirety, from its conception, execution to its afterlife, from the rocket body or the stencil painted Tianshu characters to the satellite footage, the reaction engines thrust fire as an image of Newton’s third law, to the crater traces in the Gobi desert suggesting a new sort of land art, or for that matter the impossible transmission of sound from outer space.
Xu Bing “Tianshu” Rubik’s Cube 2019-2021 Installation © Xu Bing Studio
Following the artist’s meticulous method, intuitive awareness and profound thought, the Xu Bing Tianshu became something much more than an artwork. It became a statement about the world, engaging multiple viewpoints, of the visible and the invisible, but with a total perspective. It involves all elements as carriers of meaning, not only the tangible parts with their signification, but also invisible meaning-builders, of which the most essential is the conceptual-physical unification of science and art. Or to be more precise, it’s merging of two of its most advanced forms, rocket science and the Tianshu characters, with one representing the highest level of result oriented and intelligible science and the other the articulated unintelligibility of art, the first representing logic and praxis, the second questioning it through its own conceptual unintelligibility.1 This conceptual setpoint and opposition – unintentional perhaps, intuitive for certain – is inextricable to understanding Xu Bing Tianshu.
Shipping “Xu Bing Tianshu” Rocket to Launching Site © Xu Bing Studio
Xu Bing’s conscious exploration of the complicated relationship between science and art, investigated by artists from Leonardo to Joseph Beuys, embodies both the differences and the complementarity between the two fields. Xu Bing Tianshu juxtaposes or merges art and science in one work, in which the rocket as a body of science constitutes the physical support. As such, he is triggering profound questions that force us to think, to interrogate ourselves on how we understand both art and science. How do we measure success in art ? Or for that matter failure ? What are the benchmarks ? How do we evaluate artistic efficiency ? How do we appreciate its function and use ? What are its results and how do we identify them ? Should they be measured by artistic intention or by public reception, by capital or by media ? Or are there other criteria ? These questions, if asked in regard to science, or for that matter ordinary life, would be less complicated. In this new space oriented work the characters take on another expanded meaning, questioning our fundamental preconceptions and understanding of art in regard to essential notions like success, failure, function, use, result, and the role and significance of intention, notions which guide us daily, but rarely with the necessary philosophical depth.
Xu Bing : Art Beyond the Kármán Line installation view at Red Brick Art Museum
Xu Bing (first left) at the opening scene of the Xu Bing: Art Beyond the Kármán Line exhibition
Xu Bing “
”(The work continues to be creating.) 2021 © Xu Bing Studio
In an exemplary way Xu Bing Tianshu opens up the function of art and its many meanings, clarifying its relation to the logic of normal science and contemporary society, contexts where results are conceived of as objectively measurable. This effect is already inherent in the artist’s Book from the Sky which introduced the Tianshu characters some 35 years ago. 4000 characters, or to speak with Roland Barthes semiotics, 4000 signifiers standing as the extreme opposite to the immediately signified or readable, to the discursive linear logic of text, and to normal science. To understand Xu Bing Tianshu we do need to explore these Tianshu characters which positioned not only Xu Bing but Chinese contemporary art at the forefront on the international stage. A formidable showcase in concept, intention, ambition, duration, perseverance, genesis, form, intuitivity and interpretative openness, it’s a piece which made manifest a depth, a vision and complexity, a conceptual imagination and method that surpassed most of what was being created in the West at the time. An artwork which in one blow crowned Xu Bing as the uncontested leader of Chinese contemporary art, as the true heir to a lineage of artists like Marcel Duchamp, Yves Klein, Piero Manzoni, Yoko Ono, Robert Rauschenberg, Andy Warhol, Marcel Broodthaers, and of course Joseph Beuys. Tianshu became an iconic symbol, an intellectual monument, which through its simplicity and complexity instantly entered the orbit of art history. It proclaimed loud and clear a new era for China on the world stage of contemporary art, and more importantly perhaps, in our minds and hearts.
Xu Bing Detail design of the “Xu Bing Tianshu” Rocket 2019-2021 © Xu Bing Studio
Xu Bing Tianshu is a statement on many levels. It is beautiful, it is poetic, it blends metaphor and cutting-edge reality, it embodies both soft power and hard power, it shows how the world is guarded and guided by a scientific unintelligibility. It also shows that what the scientific community views as a failure, can in art be considered a success. This is why it finds a most profound meaning in the notion and theory of “incommensurability”, a powerful concept formulated by the American philosopher of science Thomas S. Kuhn in his groundbreaking work The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962), exploring the characteristics generating scientific development.
The central idea of Kuhn’s extraordinarily influential book is how the development of science is driven by adherence to what he called a paradigm, a term used to define a universally recognizable scientific current or worldview that, for a time, provides problems and solutions for the scientific community. The dominant paradigm is usually accepted until anomalies are revealed, triggering some scientists to begin to question the basis of the paradigm itself, making new theories emerge that challenge the dominant paradigm. When eventually the dominant paradigm is superseded by a rival theory accepted by the scientific community as more apt to solve the current problems, then what occurs is, what Kuhn calls, a paradigm shift.
Xu Bing “Xu Bing Tianshu” Rocket: The First-Stage Rocket Back to the Land 2021 Installation © Xu Bing Studio
Following Kuhn’s theory one paradigm is incommensurable with a different paradigm, in that there is no common measure for assessing the distinct scientific theories. This incommensurability rules out certain kinds of theoretical comparisons and consequently rejects traditional linear or monistic views of scientific development. It opposes the idea that later science builds on the knowledge contained within earlier theories, or that later science are closer approximations to the truth than earlier theories. Instead it acknowledges that different paradigms exist simultaneously and in parallel. This understanding of development can of course also be applied to art and aesthetics, perfectly illustrated in how the paradigm of abstract painting is incommensurable, or have no common measures, with representative painting. This concept is formidably embodied in the Tianshu characters in its relation to the Chinese writing system, of the signifier and the signified. 
Preparation before the launching of “Xu Bing Tianshu” Rocket © Xu Bing Studio
“Xu Bing Tianshu” Rocket Launching © Xu Bing Studio
The notion of incommensurability is key to understanding the Tianshu characters, and becomes even more distinct in regard to the Xu Bing Tianshu rocket, where art and science are inextricable parts of each other. There is no common measure. Xu Bing has so to speak merged two incommensurable fields, one with a measurable objective of success or of failure, another going beyond any benchmark-limited appreciation. Because success in science is different from success in art, a scientific failure can be an artistic success, while the function and use of both are completely inconsistent. A failed rocket launch does not signify that the artwork failed. On the contrary, the two fields' raison d’être have distinct logics and speak about different things, with various objectives and measures, and can as such basically not be compared.
Xu Bing : Art Beyond the Kármán Line installation view at Red Brick Art Museum
Art and science can of course formulate similar problematics, and co-exist, and as history has shown, even influence each other. Left-brain fields, such as rocket- and neuroscience, robotics or computer science can be inspired when crossing over into right-brain territory to enhance and open-up their methods of thinking and refining fresh ideas. Whereas right-brain artists can be inspired by the possibilities and rigorous methods inherent in new technologies and scientific discoveries. However, if intention is primordial in science and usually linked to a method of mathematical logic and tangible result-oriented expectancies, this is much less the case in art. Art accepts and triggers the intuitive use of the subconscious and chance methods, the intangible and unknown are some of its most essential variables and important instruments, alongside subjective interpretation and projection of meaning, not to mention intuition. What both have in common though, is a quest for innovation, for original thought and action, and the hope of human advancement.
Xu Bing " "(The work continues to be creating.) 2021 © Xu Bing Studio
The conception of the Tianshu characters has some basic similarities to a scientific method. One being its conscious and expanded use of the bihua stroke system, the minimal and repeatable strokes that constitute the basic building blocks of all written characters in the Chinese writing system. The Tianshu characters are all inventions of new configurations of the bihua stroke system, as formal negations to those existing, as characters conditioned to be dissimilar from any of the 106,230 defined in the “Yìtǐzì zìdiǎn” (异体字字典), or with the 12,500 characters included in the Modern Chinese Language Dictionary. (现代汉语词典).
Xu Bing Detail design of the “Xu Bing Tianshu” Rocket 2019-2021 © Xu Bing Studio
The Tianshu characters involve a traditional thus familiar structure and form of strokes, that defines Chinese civilization. Strokes intended and configured to shape and unite the signifier with the signified, but which Xu Bing composes in such a way that it alienates them. The signifier breaks away from the signified, separating form from conventional meaning and function, thus changing the common purpose of a character as being identifiable with a specific use and signification. Xu Bing transforms the common use and form of the bihua stroke system into unconventional configurations, images or characters, that are incommensurable as signifiers. Instead they carry unknown meanings that we as readers or viewers, interpreters or oracles, have to find ourselves. Thus they become abstract signifiers, symbols of a new language, constituting another metaphoric vocabulary. They adhere to the modernist conceptual tradition of abstract art, avoiding all representation or identification, breaking away from the instantly signified, but with a distinct profound and empowering meaning: to create a new space of understanding, a new paradigm.
Xu Bing : Art Beyond the Kármán Line installation view at Red Brick Art Museum
The Tianshu characters can furthermore be seen in the light of the thousands of Chinese characters that have been forgotten, which no-one today can read, decipher, or understand. Where the signifier has broken with the signified, a vocabulary’s meaning has perished in the flood of time, a loss that makes the Tianshu characters refer to both history and heritage. Highlighting the importance of cherishing a legacy as basic and crucial as the written language, it is a powerful reference to memory, to tradition, to a lost vocabulary, and in a way, even to the notion of the end of language itself. Yet simultaneously, the Tianshu characters with all its non-dualism can be interpreted as metaphors for the origin and invention of language as such. Its unintelligibility and unreadability in regard to an existing writing system carries conceptual similarities to the earliest confirmed evidence of Chinese script from the late Shang dynasty 1200 BC, which found its origin in inscriptions from pyromantic divinations, performed by shamans or divinators in communication with royal ancestral spirits. The divinator would carve questions onto an animal bone or turtle plastron, and then apply intense heat to it with a metal rod until the bone cracked. The shaman would thereafter read the cracks, interpret the pattern and forms created by the fire, as abstract signifiers with no apparent meaning, and inscribe the prognostication, an interpretation, upon the bone piece. A process of interpretation, of linguistic origin, that relates to the Tianshu characters on both a conceptual and contextual level, the pyromantic oracle cracks and the Tianshu characters are both abstract forms given a signification through human interpretation.
Xu Bing Rendering of the “Xu Bing Tianshu” Rocket 2019-2021 © Xu Bing Studio
Xu Bing Tianshu unites and embodies in its form, function and use, the origin of civilization - its written language, with the most advanced frontiers of contemporary intelligence, manifested through rocket science and cutting-edge technology. Xu Bing selected 269 characters after having sorted and revised thousands of characters from the original Tianshu. They were then cut out on a film and affixed to the rocket as to be stencil painted as positives in black aerosol paint onto its slim and shiny white metal body. The artist’s use of this universal painting technique gives them a slightly different meaning from the original 4000 characters carved as negatives into woodblocks to be printed in a traditional Song dynasty book-form. As a painting technique with multiple references, it denotes both the early cave painting some 35,000 years ago and military usage, while also being the preferred painting technique of contemporary street artists like Banksy, who employs it for its speed so as not to get arrested. These references of meaning of course expands the Tianshu characters’ signification in the contemporary context of the art rocket.
Xu Bing Detail design of the “Xu Bing Tianshu” Rocket 2019-2021 © Xu Bing Studio
The Tianshu characters are thus stencil painted on the rocket’s stages, which constitute the sections that are successively fired and detached to make the ship penetrate Earth’s atmosphere and reach space. The operative principle of the stages is the rocket’s need of a certain amount of thrust to get above the atmosphere, and then further thrust to accelerate into orbital speed at 8 km per second, fast enough to stay in orbit around Earth. It is easier for a rocket to get to that orbital speed without having to carry the excess weight of empty propellant tanks and early-stage rockets. So when the fuel for each rocket stage is used up, the ship jettisons that stage, and it falls back to Earth empty. If the Xu Bing Tianshu’s first stage was expected to land in the vast Gobi desert, the second was calculated to fall down into the snowy mountains near Qamdo in Tibet. The characters of the Xu Bing Tianshu were thus from the beginning conceived to fall back from the sky, hitting the Earth’s surface.
Obviously, if Xu Bing would not have stencil painted his Tianshu characters on the rocket stages, the collision and the monumental crater that it created would not have carried meaning. The characters symbolism of the incommensurable and enigmatic, alienating the signifier from the signified as a deconstruction, would neither have had the same significance. But with the monumental crater created by the collision of the Tianshu characters rocket and Earth, meaning becomes preponderant. Like a bomb, like a missile of art and poetry, a work of land art was symbolically created from Heaven, with signifiers of the unsignified, using the forces of Gravity and Chance. This landmark further evokes the surface of the Moon covered by thousands of craters, in the absence of an atmosphere, of a Kármán Line, defending it from incoming impacting asteroids and meteorites. It’s a crater symbolizing both art and survival, giving an existential quality to the Xu Bing Tianshu.
Xu Bing“Xu Bing Tianshu” Rocket: Crater 2019-2021 Video © Xu Bing Studio
Following Xu Bing’s total conception the parts of the work that would stay in orbit was the satellite and installed on its main body, a 5.5 cm3 large “Tianshu Magic Cube”. Its function was to transmit the sound of space back to earth, whereas the satellite would send back real-time imagery of the Magic Cube’s operations with the moving background of the spacescape. As a model for the Tianshu Magic Cube, Xu Bing used the famous Rubik’s Cube. An extremely popular puzzle invented in 1980 by the Hungarian sculptor and architect Ernő Rubik and sold in hundreds of millions of copies worldwide. It was an outstanding example of the fusion of design and science, with its six faces constituted by nine square stickers in six solid colors: white, red, blue, orange, green, and yellow, and with an internal pivoting mechanism enabling each face to turn independently, thus mixing up the colors. With more than 3.000.000.000 possible permutations, it only had one solution. When each face was returned to its original one color state. In Xu Bing’s transfiguration of the Tianshu Magic Cube all of its faces are black, unified, with a different Tianshu character engraved in white on each square sticker. Thus with all sides undifferentiated by color and in the absence of a pivoting mechanism all function was eliminated, alongside any possibility to even wish for a solution.
Xu Bing“Xu Bing Tianshu” Rocket: Crater 2019-2021 Video © Xu Bing Studio
As a conceptual masterpiece where meaning meets imaginative openness, the genius of the Tianshu Magic Cube lies in its profound simplicity. Its core meaning is embedded in its real scientific and artistic function, which is to capture the impossible, to transmit sound from outer space where no sound exists. Video of this seemingly meaningless function, because impossible, is then transmitted back to Earth in real-time. Beautiful images from outer space with no other function than to bluntly show a black static and silent Tianshu Magic Cube attached to a satellite moving in the spacescape. Proving its existence by the transmission of surveillance footage of the scientifically ‘meaningless’ act of recording sound in a soundless environment. As a kind of double negation of both meaning and function, it’s meaningless, perhaps from a logical scientific functional point of view, but highly significant and meaningful from the viewpoint of a conceptually oriented art paradigm, to use Kuhn’s terminology. Meaning and function are both generated, as a poetic and beautiful statement about ourselves, about the world, and the essence of art, as well as on the very act of creation, confirming once more – and in space - that there is no common measure in art for assessing signification, in a soundless world without resonance.
Xu Bing“Xu Bing Tianshu” Rocket: Crater 2019-2021 Video © Xu Bing Studio
Xu Bing : Art Beyond the Kármán Line installation view at Red Brick Art Museum
Xu Bing (first left) at the opening scene of the Xu Bing: Art Beyond the Kármán Line exhibition，Photo：Galin Nadjiaf-Wulff
Xu Bing’s appreciation of conceptual detail is - like in the rest of his ouvre - manifested in the Tianshu Magic Cube. His use of one of the most popular toys in contemporary history, as a symbol, a puzzle, a model is just like the bihua stroke system, of logic thought and science, of function, efficiency and human speed. A signifier which Xu Bing transfigures by replacing its six colors by a black achrome, he changes its visual appearance thus removing its function in the manner of the Tianshu characters. Moreover, in replacing each coloured sticker with a unique Tianshu character, as an expanded concept of the incommensurable, marked by a seal sign of the unintelligible, of imagination, he’s articulating a replacement of the idea of a solution with the concept of a non-solution, of imagination and unsignified openness, as a parallel paradigm. This is an idea corresponding with the logically meaningless purpose to transmit sound where there is none, like breathing in an oxygen-free zone.
“Xu Bing Tianshu” Rocket Launching © Xu Bing Studio
There are obviously more meanings to be extracted or transmitted from the Tianshu Magic Cube, as well as from the Xu Bing Tianshu rocket. There may even be more than 300,000,000 interpretations through the many different permutations of technical, visual, functional, non-functional, spiritual, generic, triggering, sensory, emotional and conceptual variables and significations the work involves. These aspects will generate even more meaning, oriented to live on in our minds, as an example and a model, resulting in a more profound understanding of the importance of the incommensurable, the principle that there are not always common measures. That there is perhaps no solution, that the functions can be something else than what they appear to, that the signifier and the signified are not always unified. And perhaps too, that there is never failure, only development and change. 
A Piece of “Xu Bing Tianshu” Rocket Remains © Xu Bing Studio
Image/Jonas Stampe
Picture/ Red Brick Art Museum 、Xu Bing Studio
