Features THE CHINESE ARTIST XU BING has long experimented to stunning effect with the limits of the written form. Xu Bing was illustrating what recent studies in neuroscience have revealed: People everywhere read words made from pictures, such as Chinese characters (known as pictographs), and words made from letters, in a remarkably similar way. But this was no ordinary Chinese text: Xu Bing had taken the form, even constituent parts, of real characters, to create around 4,000 entirely false versions. Twomey conducted other research that compared reading strategies between individuals, scanning the brains of people reading in Chinese and English. [Extracted from the article]