Leaving White

Leaving White puts a question to two works: YoYo’s story “The Solitary Wind” and Yang Lian’s Where the Sea Stands Still — and lets AI answer. A woman tries to hold the wind still. A sea below a cliff near Sydney stops moving, and goes on moving. Yo Yo’s story and Yang Lian’s sequence were written decades and continents apart and never meant to be read together; both are about what happens when we try to still what cannot be held. Both stand at the front of the book, alone, to be met before they are explained. Two extended essays follow, their prose generated by AI under Jan-Peter Schuring’s sustained human direction, judgement and revision — a result that astonished even the authors themselves. The title comes from liubai, the Chinese painter’s term for the unpainted space that carries the picture. Made with the very instrument whose fluency threatens to fill every silence, Leaving White asks what interpretation should leave unsaid, and whether we can still meet a work of art before the answers arrive.