Inspired by the famous artist Xu Bing, students designed their own "characters" and wrote their invention following the traditional brushwork and stroke-order of Chinese calligraphy. Xu Bing is famous for his works that explore the intersection of communication, language, art, and humanity. Students in Chinese calligraphy studied his work Tianshu ("Book from the Sky"), an installation of hand-written calligraphic books and scrolls made up of meaningless "characters" that simply appear to resemble the traditional Chinese language. Students also studied his work, "Square Word Calligraphy", a method of writing English words that assigns radical-like structures to each letter and follows an ordered hierarchy for construction (see image).