 Though he originally resisted tradition, he has since come to appreciate that one must understand tradition in order to better rebel against it.In the 1980s, he began the first of a series of projects centered on the invention of meaningless, false Chinese ideograms, depicted as if they were truly old and traditional.One exhibition of this type, held in Xi'an in 1986, featuring paintings of fake ideograms on a massive scale, was shut down by the authorities who, being unable to read it, assumed it carried a subversive message.