if on the silk road, a traveler

“if on the silk road, a traveler” (2014) distills the experience of (im)personal journeys on the ancient Silk Road that connected East and West. It is designed as a board game, an archive, a speculative archeology session, a writing tool of possible histories, and much more. Regulated by dice-throwing, the game offers players to advance geographically along key spots of the Silk Road while embodying a set of characters, both historical and contemporary, real and fictional. The characters, counting more than 30, include as early as Buddhist monks from the 4th to 7th century, Marco Polo, and all the way to early 20th century European explorers and geographers such as Sven Hedin and Aurel Stein. A rich archive of materials including documents, images and videos supplement the characters, which the players are encouraged to read, make sense of and speculate on. The players may use the game as a forum to discuss their relation to the material, and their personal associations, research questions and possible histories are added to the archive in the form of writing, drawing and sometimes even bodily movement (captured on camera). The game may in theory go on endlessly just as the Silk Road lives on with all its trans-historical inhabitants and travelers, and facilitate a sense not unlike Nietzsche’s “every name in history is I.”