When the Chinese performance artist and calligrapher Xu Bing received the MacArthur "Genius" Award last June, the first thing he did was call his Mom.

"I told her I was given a 'genius' prize, and I said 'It was you who gave birth to this genius.' She's always been very supportive of my work. She doesn't understand it, but she believes in me."

It's not hard to understand his mother's perplexity, as well as her pleasure, at her son's artistic success. Forty-four years old and a U.S. resident for the past ten years, Xu Bing's art plies the murky metaphysical waters that run between language, culture, identity and nationhood. He once spent three years of his life handcarving thousands of woodblocks to print what at first appear to be exquisite books and scrolls filled with Chinese "characters" - the daubs and slashes of the Chinese writing system. Upon close reading, though, his hundreds of thousands of characters turn out to be utterly meaningless, if exquisitely beautiful, forms.

In a famous performance piece put on in Beijing in 1994, Xu Bing stamped temporary tattoos of English words on a lively male pig, and Chinese characters on a female pig, and put them both in a pen - where they mated in short order. In 1999, he has exhibited critically-acclaimed works in this vein at major art galleries and museums including the New Museum in New York and others in Japan, Australia, Germany, Mexico, and in Canada.