Square Word Calligraphy, the Duck-Rabbit, and the Gravitational Arena
By opportune timing and a sincere dedication, I was able to e-see Xu Bing’s Gravitational Arena (2021 – 2022), currently at the Art Museum Pudong in Shanghai, China, by proxy. The installation stretches from B1 to the 4th floor, and it takes on the form of a vortex. Instead of air or fluid however, it is composed of the artist’s Square Word Calligraphy, an English writing system which mimics Chinese calligraphy that Xu developed in the 1990s.
Structurally, one can imagine a square-dimensioned scripture facing upwards, pinned down in the centre by a pointed force of gravity to create a vortex of characters. The pin of gravity pulls down the scripture to the B1 floor, where it is met with a mirror on the floor that reflects its dramatic descent back into the sky.
The calligraphy contemplates upon Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations, Section II, where the philosopher famously employs psychologist Joseph Jastrow’s illustration of a duck-rabbit–a drawing that appears to be both a side profile of a rabbit and a duck, depending on its orientation.
In the text, Wittgenstein demonstrates the difference between ‘[seeing]’ and ‘[noticing] an aspect’–or in simpler terms, the difference between perception and an interpretation of perception. At first glance, the illustration may appear to be a duck–conduced as seeing, but upon deliberation it may reappear as a rabbit. The key here is the change of perception of an image into something other than its first given impression, which in turn is presupposed by the fact that we can only see one image at the time. In the bigger world of Wittgenstein’s philosophy, he speaks about the ways in which instances like ‘seeing’ and ‘noticing’ and it’s expression through language only allows for a specific perception of essentially, the world.
Now back to the art. Perception is an inherent element of this five-story tall installation, which then counts its viewing visitors as another key part of the artwork. Visitors are given a diagram that points to five different perspective points of different elevation to see the Gravitational Arena (hint: you can see the duck-rabbit from the third floor’s observatory window). There is also an ideal sixth viewpoint–the bird’s eye view where from the ideal perspective, one will be able to see an uninterrupted view of the Square Word Calligraphy scripture.
The sheer scale of the work, however, prohibits us all from a full grasp of the image in one eye. Perhaps this is where Xu and Wittgenstein continue their transtemporal dialogue; Xu’s law of perspective emerges from a concern regarding our perceptions, especially of the ways that digitization of communication and the use of ordinary language shape our knowledge of the external world. Wittgenstein, although preceding our time by two-thirds of a century, shared a similar root concern regarding the mediation of language in its use of accounting for the way things were in the world. For both thinkers, it is the limitation of language and its structural rigor that allows us to see certain parts of the world, while at the same time, shading us from another. Like the Gravitational Arena, the ‘ideal perspective’ of the world is far out of reach.
In a talk at Cornell University, Xu shared a slice of his phenomenology where he introduces his worldview through the unit of civilization. He suggests that while civilizations share the subject of which their concerns spring from, it is in the differences of the way they formulate their understandings of it through language, where divergence, and often, friction occur. To end it off, here are the final few lines from the exhibition text:
‘An arena full of tensions and gravitation is thereby created. Similarly, the distortion of the characters in space makes the work fall into chaos of illegibility, in which every single element points to an “ideal perspective” suspended outside the exhibition hall. As if all the chaos in the world is for an unknown purpose. Unseen but existing.’
Dyana Kim. All images my own.
1 March 2024