Xu Bing's Asia Society retrospective demonstrates conceptual thinking

This mini-retrospective at the Asia Society is the brainchild of one of China's most cerebral and challenging artists, Xu Bing.

Curator Koon Yeewan has set the tone of the exhibition by selecting a range of mostly recent artworks displaying the conceptual development of Xu's ideas and his innovative transformation of materials.

Xu came to prominence in the early 1980s with a self-developed written "language" whose form and layout looked like traditional Chinese but, in what may have been a subversive slight towards the unyielding and bureaucratic Chinese state, was unreadable nonsense. A good example of this is his large woodblock print Book from the Sky, which, however, is not included in this exhibition.

Xu's latest exploration of language is his Book from the Ground. Its development is explored within an elaborate reconstruction of a working office installation as part of the exhibition.

This language is composed of a range of symbols from the internet age, seen on electronic devices and used as shorthand in social media.