Solid-State Novel

Imagine walking into an emptied room. The furniture is gone and no one is there to explain. But pale rectangles on the walls mark where pictures hung, and scuffs on the floor show where heavy things were dragged. Without being told anything, you begin to imagine the people who lived here, how they arranged their days, and why they left.

Solid-State Novel works the same way. It is a method of making art through fiction: imagine a world, then create its consequences. The audience meets the consequences, not the events that produced them, and reads backward from what is present toward a world that stays unseen. Only a fragment of that world is made physically; the larger narrative lives in the forms, materials, and relationships of the things themselves. Faced with these fragments, viewers ask what they are, what they were for, where they came from, and what history lies behind them. A few visible traces are enough for imagination to reach an absent world.

Reversing the direction of a story

Storytelling generally leads a reader through events toward their consequences:

World → Events → Consequences → Objects

Solid-State Novel omits that process and presents the consequences directly. The audience rebuilds the invisible story in the opposite direction:

Objects → Consequences → Events → Causality → Institutions → World

Objects as consequences: PROLOGUE / NULL

The first practical example is Prologue / Null, set in an imagined future after human civilization has ended.

What remains is a fragmentary historical record: pages without words, keeping only discontinuous page numbers. These minimal traces suggest a book once existed; its former extent can almost be sensed, but its contents can no longer be recovered. The pages are permanently sealed in a lipid-like substance, and their container is assembled from remnants of an earlier industrial age.

The work never explains how civilization reached this condition. The material evidence raises questions instead. Why have the words disappeared? Why can history no longer be read? Who sealed these documents? Why preserve something permanently if no one will ever retrieve it?

Those questions activate the narrative, which begins in the viewer’s imagination. Causes and processes stay outside the visible work; blank pages, surviving numbers, materials, and the method of preservation carry the narrative together. From these limited consequences, the audience approaches an unsettling future whose history remains largely unseen.

From a finished object to an ongoing reality: moleculab

Solid-State Novel need not be a completed object. It can be an operating institution, including manufactured objects, research archives, organizational activities, and social relationships.

moleculab (m所) extends the method from something contemplated as an object into something that continues to happen in reality. The emptied room returns with a reversal: this time it is not empty. People are actually working inside.

moleculab is a fictional research institute that operates in the real world. Its subject of research is a world designated DC4739. The institute has a real-world operating entity; it conducts experiments, establishes archives, produces samples, and distributes them. Visitors can explore its research materials on its website, apply for experimental samples, and even become sponsors.

Its first experimental sample is MONO.OX. It resembles mahjong but is not the familiar object it first appears to be. Within the fictional framework, MONO.OX is a fossil reconstruction from the civilization of DC4739, connected to a secret concealed for a thousand years.

The working institute is itself a visible fragment of the imagined world, and it raises questions of its own. What kind of institution is this? Did the events it studies actually happen? Why is mahjong classified as an experimental sample? Why would that civilization have had mahjong at all? Who else supports the institute? These questions arise through the same mechanism as NULL’s. But here the audience can also examine archives, acquire samples, and take part in institutional activities, and new events, records, objects, and relationships keep emerging as the institute operates.

The contrast:

NULL presents the surviving consequences of a world that has already ended.

moleculab lets an imagined world keep producing consequences in reality.

DC4739 is imagined. The institute’s work is real.

Fiction as a way of building worlds

In Solid-State Novel, “novel” refers to a way of building worlds. Every object has an origin. Every event has causes and consequences. Whatever is visible belongs to a larger network of relationships, and those relationships shape how an artwork is actually made.

So the artist need not write a complete novel first and then manufacture its fictional props. The starting point can be a silent object, a supernatural experiment, or an unusual way of preserving something. The imagined world grows through making, and once it exists it constrains each further creative decision.

In NULL, the disappearance of text, the survival of page numbers, and the permanent sealing of paper are consequences consistent with the imagined history of its future. In moleculab, sample production, numbering systems, research archives, and distribution procedures follow the institute’s internal logic; a fictional research institute has to operate convincingly as one within that logic.

The central creative principle:

The artist creates a world, then allows the logic of that world to determine the artwork.

The process is reciprocal. The world develops during creation and need not exist beforehand as a finished story. Written language can still take part through titles, archives, and research reports, but the whole story never has to be told outright. A viewer may meet an object first and only afterward discover the world it belongs to.

Why “solid”

“Solid” describes how the story reaches its audience. Written fiction is like a liquid: sentences follow one another and the narrative flows through the reader over time. Solid-State Novel instead compresses narrative into objects, materials, and relationships that exist together in the present.

So it does not require everyone to follow the same path or reach the same ending. One viewer may begin with an object’s shape, another with its identification number, another with an archive that leads back to a sample. A number may suggest an entire institutional system, a material an era, an object’s function the everyday life of another civilization. The story extends beyond what can be seen, but concrete evidence sets imagination going.

Viewers are not asked to reconstruct an exact, complete novel held in the artist’s mind. The work offers meaningful clues and leaves parts of the world unexplained. Institutions can keep operating, archives can grow, and relationships between works can change, so the narrative stays open and keeps developing.

Solid-State Novel does not flow past you; you encounter it.

Worlds beyond tomorrow

Solid-State Novel is a method with a particular orientation: it is concerned with worlds beyond tomorrow. Its purpose is neither to predict the future nor to admonish the present.

NULL looks back on history from the end of human civilization. moleculab resembles an archaeological institution from the future, studying the remains of another civilization. Both carry out an apparent contradiction: they imagine futures, yet look at them with the backward gaze usually turned toward the distant past. Times that have not yet arrived are imagined as though they had existed and vanished, leaving only remnants and memories.

We stand in the present and mourn the future. It is a kind of nostalgia for antiquity, except that this antiquity lies at the other end of time.

1

Yang Qiong is best understood as an author whose practice begins in contemporary art and extends into design, branding, and business. He began his professional contemporary art practice in 2010, and art remains its starting point and long-term core. These are not separate careers, but different media and real-world fields through which the same ideas take form. As his practice has expanded, “artist” alone no longer fully describes its scope. Yang therefore prefers “author” as a broader identity for the whole of his work, without replacing his identity as an artist.
2

Solid-State Novel is an artistic concept proposed by Yang Qiong: making art with the methods of fiction, or novel-making. It imagines a world and brings its consequences into reality as objects, archives or even institutions that actually operate. Viewers begin with these visible traces and work backward toward the untold world behind them. The concept emerged from his artistic practice and continues to develop alongside it.