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Book of meaningless glyphs by artist Xu Bing

A Book from the Sky is a book produced by Chinese artist Xu Bing in the style of fine editions from the Song and Ming dynasties, but filled entirely with meaningless glyphs designed to resemble traditional Chinese characters. The book, which consists of four volumes totaling 604 pages, was printed in a single print run of 126 copies between 1987 and 1991, and was first publicly exhibited in October 1988, in Beijing's China Art Gallery. The work was originally titled Mirror to Analyze the World: The Century’s Final Volume , a title which "evokes the trope of the book as jian c=鍳 or mirror in the venerable tradition of imperial historiography". However, the artist eventually felt that this title was "cumbersome" and "heavily influenced by Western forms and the current cultural climate",

The book is composed using a set of 4,000 characters, as this is roughly the number of characters in common usage in modern written Chinese. These characters were designed on the basis of the Kangxi radicals, so that "in terms of density of strokes and frequency of occurrence, they appear, on the page, to be real characters". said to have been authored by an agent of the Ministry of Culture, described it as "ghosts building walls" , i. e., obfuscation for the sake of obfuscation. In later works such as Square Word Calligraphy and Book from the Ground, he takes this idea further by subverting the logographic nature of the Chinese script in ways that make it broadly accessible.