A Question for I-Ching

Statement:

From this side of the world where we stand, one question has always occupied our minds: What will happen?

A question born of anxiety, whose speaker seeks only one answer: It will be alright. A question emerging from repeated experiences of rupture and instability, from moments when the course of events slips beyond our will and predictability gives way to ambiguity and fate.

This question arises from living within a condition in which our agency is often overpowered by forces external to ourselves; a world where, instead of constructing the future, we attempt to decipher it.

In this project, destiny and fate were realized through a practical process: the curator, acting as a fortune teller, laid out the setting of the ritual, asked the artists to concentrate on an intention, and then to toss coins six times.

The result of each toss was recorded, and based on these outcomes, a six-line hexagram was drawn, forming the structure of the divination.

Whatever was received as the response of the I Ching became the point of departure for the work. Some artists remained faithful to the text of the divination, while others transformed it through confrontation with their own experiences; meanwhile, the text itself was at times readjusted in relation to the works produced.

At the moment of reading and interpreting the divination, regardless of each participant’s personal belief in it, a shared suspension emerged: for brief moments, argument and logic were set aside; reactions fluctuated between reassurance and anxiety, and at times there was even an insistence on repeating the divination itself.

Ultimately, what took shape was not an exact translation of a prophecy, but a collection of responses to possibilities opened in the moment of divination — responses that, rather than bringing the question “What will happen?” to an end, prolong it within a renewed state of suspension.