Long-Bin Chen's work has always combined cultural contexts --East and West-- and artistic forms --sculpture and literature. He makes plastic art out of literary art, re-creating something new out of something old (discarded books), and inspiring a new way to look at books. We are prompted not only to think about our cultural debris and the eternal problem of communication, but now also of the social relationship we have with books.

Chen’s work has also always had a sense of humor, and his new wor k takes its name playfully from Facebook. Inspired early on as student by Marshall McLuhan’s media theory that “the medium is the message,” that influence takes mature form in Chen’s most recent work. Where McLuhan’s radical theories in the 1970s talked about the steps from tribal pre-alphabetical writings through to the electronic age and radically predicting television as the new art form, Chen imagined McLuhan relevant again in the 1990s with the advent of the World Wide Web. The Chinese first wrote on stone, then inside a bamboo stick, then on paper. It was the invention of print media and of movable type that have shaped the work of both McLuhan and Chen.

With the arrival of the personal computer, books as things became unwanted, unnecessary, and were discarded. And Long-Bin Chen had an idea: books themselves as the media, the form, the art. The medium as message, relevant again (or, more importantly, relevant still: an organic theory being most scrupulous and honorable). As he walked around New York, he noticed more and more discarded books. So he’d go around on recycling day looking for them. He noticed an inordinate amount of discarded telephone books and the beginning of his career is filled with sculptures made out the New York City telephone book. The idea being to give them life again.

Nowadays he has no want for books, of all kinds. He finds piles on the streets on recycling day; people, charities, libraries, and professors donate entire collections. And no one’s buying them; independent bookstores can’t stay open. So Long-Bin looks at his work as giving the book a second life. Could his work be preparing for THE END OF THE BOOK? Will libraries become museums?

In 2004, Chen visited the National Archive in Rome only to notice that the books were on display. It felt like a museum, not a library. The books had no function other than to be looked at as things. And the idea of books asart, or artifice, is not limited to historical archives. I am thinking of the pretentious reader: the one with all the “right” books on his shelf, the one who dresses the part and wears horn-rimmed glasses, the one with The Pale King out on his coffee table in the Hamptons but who can’t speak a word about it. Again: books as art.

Chen started what he calls “cutting books” in 1993 in order to give books a second life. He turns to Walter Benjamin for sanction. In an article on shelving his library, Benjamin says “to a true collector, the acquisition of an oldbookisitsrebirth”[p.61]. Hebelievesthatacquiringasecond-hand book is a process of renewal and the most distinguished trait of that process of “transmissibility” [p.61]. It is a lovely idea of inheritance and succession, and in that way carries with it a crucial social element.

And with that a social network? Chen’s exhibit, Bookface, may joke on the word and social world of Facebook, but it’s not mere wordplay. Think of the telephone book as a small world, all the people inter-connected within it. Similarly, the Web and social networks: their own little worlds. But each one has a member, connected to another; each is its own small society; each has meaning for the members inside. The Luddite idea that the computer and the Web and social networks have isolated people is exactly wrong: it has connected them.

If you look back over Chen’s career, most of his sculptures are of faces. So why the face? Why not make a sculpture of a chair or a body? Further, why the Buddha face? First of all the face is where the brain is, says Chen. Themediaofthebookneedsthebrain,thehead. Thebook’s“face”isin the back, the human face, on the other side.

As for the Buddha, that explanation goes back to his days in art school. Firstly, being Chinese, Buddhism was part of his culture. When he came to the United States in 1992 to the School of Visual Arts in New York, his classes were so full of discussion on postmodern art and all its various bickering theories that he became unable to speak or respond; everything became too difficult, chaotic, and to the point where language could not respond. Long-Bin shut down, shut his book, turned it over, and began cutting.

He relates the story of Zen Master Huineng, an illiterate, uneducated, outsider (Chinese when most were Indian), who developed a new way to understand the intellectual--as the Zen Masters before him were too focussed on reading--and whose lecture at Columbia in the 1950s is now famous among the art world. So the young student Chen, culture shocked, quiet in broken English, frustrated with postmodernism, turned to the Buddha face. And within two years became one of the two chosen out of the 30 in his class to represent his entire department...

And now, in line with Walter Benjamin, whose article on unpacking his library, imagined his shelves as dwellings for his books, Long-Bin has incorporated shelves into his new work. It is a new and major development in Chen’s illustrious career. Instead of scouring the streets for books (they are now donated by the truckload), he hunts for second- hand bookcases. And hey are readily available on garbage night in New York. (A New York magazine reporter once furnished an entire apartment with findings along the sidewalks on garbage night.) What is different about this new project is that it takes up less space, incorporates furniture, and is more detailed and refined than his earlier works.

Books, for Chen, are still seen in terms of their shape, color, font, material and space (where most of us see them for their words and meaning). And there is, as always, a link to text; this time the books are matched to its shelf by topic.

The idea that language is an impossible means of expression is a paradox with which postmodernists continuously struggle. Meantime, Chen has constructed a message out of the medium worthy of Marshall McLuhan’s recognition. Making something new out of something old. And if “only in extinction is the [book] collector comprehended,” [p.67] Chen’s art will keep it alive... for art collectors too.


Sources quoted:
“Unpacking My Library: A Talk about Book Collecting,” Illuminations: Essays and Reflections, Walter Benjamin, ed. Hannah Arendt, (Schocken Books, Random House, New York, 2007) pp. 59-67