About the Work

In "Le livre, une immanence," the interview with Hans-Ulrich Obrist that accompanies these notebooks, Huang Yong Ping explains that they are actually composed of separate pages:
"At first I intended to classify these pages according to explicitly different concepts, and then as there were too many branches, I bound them together in a rather arbitrary resemblance.
Notebook one; The Cutting of the Tongue consists of notes relating to the washing of books. It deals with the destruction of a certain systematized language.
Notebook two; The Food of the Tongue concerns the Yi Jing, as well as all references to ancient Chinese alchemy. It is about following the indications of a forgotten method, lost in time."
The last two notebooks gather various "unclassifiable" projects, in his own words, and recent projects in the form of specific ideas. It is interesting to look closely at the titles he gives to these two notebooks. As previously seen, the method of washing books is a strategy for deconstructing rationalist logic and language; associating it with the parable of "cutting the tongue" shows that, in his view, this process represented the first step necessary for establishing another language: a language that does without speech.