MICHAEL ABRAMSON FOR TIME AIR BRUSH: Once fettered by politics, Xu now revels in his freedom by combining his native and adopted languages

It was 1974, during the Cultural Revolution, and Xu Bing was in bad shape. Slaving for the Political Propaganda Office in Beijing, Xu, then 19, would be shut up in a small, cramped room into the wee hours crouching and squinting over long scrolls, brushing big Chinese characters for wall-size posters and smaller ones for leaflets. He was pale, thin, sleep-deprived and often feverish, but as the son of a "reactionary" (his father was a prominent scholar), his health was secondary to the health of the revolution. Eventually, Xu was sent to rural Yanqing, northwest of Beijing, as part of Mao Zedong's rustication program. For the next three years Xu weeded and hoed and raked all day out in the sun; he got his health back, and devoted himself to his passion: drawing life around him. Xu sketched pigs, haystacks, mountains and withered grandmothers. "It was the best time of my life," he recalls. But when Xu returned to Beijing after the turmoil of the Cultural Revolution and was accepted into the prestigious Central Art Academy, those dark hours writing thousands of characters reappeared to haunt him—just as they do today.

Xu is now recognized as a leading figure in international art. He is the first living artist to have a solo exhibition at the Smithsonian's Sackler Gallery in Washington, D.C., and he's preparing for America's Circus Maximus of contemporary art, the Whitney Biennial, next spring. Perhaps his signature—and most controversial—project is the 1988 series of 100 books of nonsense characters that he designed, carved and printed himself. The books look like intellectual tomes—of poetry, religious treatises, reference works—all beautifully bound like the scholarly texts of the 19th century Qing dynasty, finished with indigo paper covers and placed in handmade walnut boxes. The characters look authentic but are entirely invented and mean nothing. After the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre, his books of nonsense were held up by the authorities as an example of how contemporary art in China no longer served the people. Cast as a "bourgeois liberal," Xu went into self-imposed exile in the U.S.

Xu's latest conceit to spark a stir in the art world is what he calls "Square Word Calligraphy." He combines Chinese character strokes with the Roman alphabet to create a new way of writing and thinking about language. The English word art, for example, is written with a large, brushstroked a above the r and the t. Because the word fits inside a square shape of a Chinese character, the writing looks Chinese but must be read in English. The effect is that readers of Chinese cannot comprehend the characters that look somehow familiar, and readers of English are suddenly able to understand something that at first glance looks totally foreign. "We have a concept of what's English and what's Chinese," says Xu. "I want to put these two things together."

This month Xu's installation project Classroom Calligraphy, which has appeared in galleries from London to Sydney, will be displayed at the Guangdong Museum's Triennial exhibition. It marks his first inclusion in a government-sponsored show since he left the country. One of China's most unusual characters is coming home.