The works of contemporary artists Xu Bing, Ed Pien and Gu Xiong are involved in bringing to light some of the factors inherent in social, cultural and linguistic translation. In doing so, each artist is also engaged in the nuanced activity of moving between historical and contemporary aesthetic strategies in order to interrogate the way meaning is…

Explores difficulties in translating and understanding visual poetry created by a linguistically different culture. Provides historical context and analyzes the design process of El Lissitzky's typographic presentation of Vladimir Mayakovsky's poems. Transposes the visual wordplays found in the original Cyrillic typography into the Roman alphabet.…