By a Twist of Fate

Curator: Bo Yong

Artists: He Chi, Koniniii, Mo Nijian, Zhao Bang, Zhang Zhao

Every author may, without preparation, undergo a timely lapse of attention. Before crossing Lethe, one might first accept the invitation at hand and enter into a neutral, gradually unfolding event. The subtext of “making the wrong meal” seems to be “I’ve messed up.” Of course, it can be revised; it can be recast into any syntactic form. Yet every alteration is a repetition of that very voice. When you begin to linger over this sentence that defies linguistic convention, meanings that did not originally exist start to surface. To begin with, the sentence itself was born of a slip of the tongue—a “wrong meal.” Thus this error, not yet hardened within the category of language, carries from the outset a dual tendency of overflow and infiltration.

To issue such an invitation is to plant a latent hazard. The inviter faces the risk of receiving no response; the invitee must shoulder the pressure implied by suggestion. Within a narrow seam where almost no room for assumption remains, an equality akin to “ringing the doorbell of the void” is evenly distributed between the two collaborators. One cannot tell from which trap the bait was retrieved, only that after some processing it was served at a banquet reminiscent of a Hongmen feast. Ineffective methods, pre-listed tables of contents, revoked anomalies, and the cold handling of stalemates—all, in this unadorned context, have become deleted chapters. For such a commission appears impossible to execute. In this attempt to prevent the dust from settling, offshoots beyond the main thread are awakened by betrayals without coordinates or signatures. The directive to grow converges with fractured forces, advancing from their respective directions, unanchored by any fixed point. What the two parties suspended, altered, or exchanged—including spontaneous reactions previously unknown—along with the succession of “letters,” all served to prolong the time of this turning. It also prompted me to reconsider how a writer lying in wait within an unfinished work of non-fiction might seize the moment.

It could be said that all conclusions are pretexts. They arise from an irresistible compulsion toward closure—toward the act of writing itself. In this long-unresolved encounter, a measured retreat has expanded the dimensions of the backstage space, allowing the authors within it a brief moment of calm.

—— Bo Yong