Take it or leaf it: Asian works brought to book ... and vice versa

From the front, Long-bin Chen's Guan Yin statue looks like any other: serene, solid and mottled with age. But Chen's work is made of phone books, from Manhattan, Brooklyn and Westchester, glued together and carved.

Why make religious icons out of phone books? For Taiwan-born Chen, it's a comment on the practice of chopping the heads off sacred sculptures and selling them to the west. Chen likes the idea of reforming the heads so they contain the names of millions of westerners.

Chen's Buddha head is part of the Do a Book exhibit at Plum Blossoms Gallery in New York, which includes books or book-related artwork by 25 artists from China, Korea, Japan, Taiwan, Vietnam, the Philippines and the US. Barbara Edelstein, whose works are in the permanent collections of museums in Shanghai, Guangzhou, Hangzhou and Shenzhen, created Leaf Book, by cutting leaves out of copper, soldering them into a book and immersing the book in a thin layer of water. She invites viewers to turn the pages of the rusting book, even leaving them a towel with which to dry their hands.

'Books are a way of gaining knowledge,' she says. 'But, actually, knowledge comes from nature. I wanted to get back to original knowledge. The book is readable, if a little bit delicate.'

Terence Koh, whose works were just shown at the Whitney 2004 Biennale, presented Untitled (Blue), a book wrapped in thin baby blue thread and suspended from the ceiling on a platform. Lu Shengzhong's Poetry of Harmony XII comprises four tall black scrolls covered with what looks, at a distance, to be rows of red characters. Up close, however, they turn out to be abstract paper cuts resembling human figures or hands.

For Lighting Pamphlet, Suikang Zhao covered illuminated glass panels with red words in 28 languages, running in all directions. The panels were part of a public art project in Portland, Oregon, for which Zhao interviewed residents about their best moments in the city. Zhao, who left his native Shanghai for the US almost 20 years ago, used the sense of dislocation of Portland's multicultural population to create an ironic sense of community.

The best known artist of the group, Wenda Gu, made Tea Alchemy from reams of green tea rice paper at an old factory in Anhui province, and printed Chinese poems on the paper as a mark of respect for traditional forms.