October 10, 2026. A virtual exhibition.

In Chinese folklore, the phenomenon of guǐ dǎ qiáng (鬼打墙)—ghosts building walls—describes when someone lost at night, in fog or unfamiliar terrain, walks in what feels like a straight line and returns to where they started. No wall is seen or felt; there is only the fact of return. Two explanations exist. First, the folkloric, where the living bump into barriers constructed by the mischevious dead; second, the perceptual, positing that bodies deprived of external reference points will tend to veer off the normal and walk in circles.

Both record the invisible compulsion to recur. But circling is not always a failure of orientation; it may be closer to our default setting. Recurrence is what minds do once they have run out of data to process, and that tendency to spiral, to confabulate, to revisit and reconstitute the familiar, can be seen from our experience of dreams and hallucinations.

These rooms are built from walls. Though furnished with the ordinary cues of the gallery, you may find yourself disoriented and returning to the origin. As with the mischevious guǐ dǎ qiáng, that origin may not always be the same.

Enter

Postscript. The gallery was coded up by Claude (Fable 5.1) and the images made using Midjourney (v8). Wall text, descriptions, and puzzles were created by me.

Post-postscript. Take the hint to return to the origin seriously.