This Book Has No Words

Book From the Ground by Juing is a novel written entirely in pictogram symbols, icons, and logos. It tells the story of a day in the life of an office worker. You don't need to know any particular language to read this book; you only need to be familiar with the things around us.

Let's read the first page.

Our story begins on Earth, in a city. There's a home and a tree. There's a bird singing. The bird sings, and a man in bed hears that song. Maybe he joins in. An alarm clock goes off; the bird keeps singing. Maybe they do it together. Time passes; the alarm is still going off, but the bird has stopped and flies away.

24 years before he wrote Book From the Ground, Zuu Binging wrote Book From the Sky. What appears to be a conventional, serious exhibit of Chinese writing and culture is, upon closer examination, found to be a set of more than 4,000 fake Chinese characters. The artist designed them to look as real as possible. They're beautiful, but they refer to nothing.

The works are a great pair: words without meaning and meaning without words.