The Table of Inquiry is a space for intimate encounters, shared reflection, and ongoing dialogue. This extension of Reading by an Artist expands the focus from the individual to the collective. The performance begins with a large blank canvas weighted by nine stones. The canvas and stones form a ritual surface that draws care and attention. Over the residency period, the artist writes responses to single questions submitted by participants, gradually covering the entire surface with texts.

Participants submit their questions via a QR code and are invited to return on another day to find the artist’s responses. Those who encounter the installation by chance may also submit questions on site, which are recorded and answered in turn.

As questions and responses accumulate, the table gradually becomes a record of shared concerns and reflections. It functions both as a space for individual encounter and as a collective portrait of the community at a particular moment in time.

This installation extends Reading by an Artist into a work of community participation. Nine dining chairs, each borrowed from a different family and having witnessed countless domestic moments, are arranged in the pattern of the Later Heaven Bagua (后天八卦) and its Nine Palaces (九宫), guided by the shifting cycles of the San Yuan Xuan Kong Nine Periods system (玄空九运).

Every hour, the chairs are reoriented to align with the most auspicious direction at that moment, channelling the positive energy of the space. Visitors who sit are invited to receive this alignment—to rest in its flow, attune to its rhythm, and open themselves to its potential for renewal and healing.

The central chair remains unseated. It becomes a vessel filled with salt, a material long associated with purification and protection. Each participant is invited to add a handful of salt to this chair before sitting, contributing to a collective act of cleansing and renewal.

These dining chairs carry the traces of family life—conversations, meals, laughter, and arguments—bearing witness to intimate dynamics and personal histories. When positioned within this cosmological framework, they weave together familial memory and the cycles of time and space. The turning of the chairs becomes both a reading of the environment and a ritual of care.

The city is translated into a temporal geomantic notation: a drawn “city-chart” of directions, traces, and time.