The Wordless Memorial

Yulong Zhou

2019 - 2020

The earliest ideas came from a deep sense of separation. There is a sense of powerlessness between me and this era, my job, and my life. You will find that in today's China, everyone is looking for an existence in this kind of separation and powerlessness. Their own existence and their way of being compatible with the world.And how? I don't know. There is no fixed answer, and there is no permanent right answer. The answers, right or wrong, are fleeting, just like every Chinese city today. The people we lose every day, the buildings we lost, are buried by history. So I thought, what does this fleeting history bring us? What are we in history? And we are becoming a relic of the future every day. When I saw through the buildings that were about to be demolished, saw through a sky and cut open a piece of land, I felt like I was excavating a piece of ruins. Outside the light was darkness, which covered the fleeting light. Light and darkness were like a symbiotic contradiction, wandering in the transition between reality and illusion. What is in the site is not important, and all of us will eventually become part of the site. In the Qianling mausoleum in Xianyang, Shanxi province, there is a tablet without words, which was erected by the tang dynasty emperor Wu zetian after her death. All achievements and mistakes must be made in silence. Like the monolith of Arthur Clarke's 2001 space Odyssey, which he wrote: “Like a thunderbolt, like a cloud, like an eclipse, the crystal slate, mysterious as it came, went away. The slate disappears into a past that did not exist, and no longer obsesses the mind of the moon-watcher”.

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