PROLOGUE / NULLCurrent

Mankind is no more.

The last documents of its civilization:
a set of paper records, pages without words.
The pages have been formatted.
Only discontinuous page numbers remain.
The total count is unknown.

In the Posterior Era, material production no longer exists.
The only containers available for preserving these records
come from the industrial remains
of the Anterior Era, 20.8th century A.D.
The pages are permanently sealed in a lipid-like substance.

To seal is to presume retrieval.
No retrieval is presumed here.

RECORDER: UNKNOWN

PROLOGUE / NULL opens Yang Qiong’s eight-year serial art project, structured in the chaptered form of a classical Chinese serial narrative. Organized around “a premonition of the future,” the project unfolds backward from its endpoint. It begins where things end.

Its aesthetic position is an inverted form of huaigu, the traditional act of looking back on the past. Here the direction is reversed: from a future endpoint that has not yet arrived, the work looks back at the present and earlier times. This huaigu becomes an act of mourning for things already destined to disappear, without satire or moral instruction.

The objects in PROLOGUE / NULL are treated as evidence left at the end of civilization. Their remaining formats, numbers, materials, and methods of preservation carry the traces of content that has already disappeared. The viewer encounters the aftermath first and reconstructs what came before from what remains.

The works function as physical future fables. They give absence a material form and turn the end of a narrative into its point of departure. Under the silence of a cosmic scale, human narratives collapse into a brief residue of coldness and poetry.