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Notes: "The Lanting xu or Preface Written at the Orchid Pavilion was written by one of the most famous ancient calligraphers, Wang Xizhi. The original version was said to have been buried with the emperor Tang Taizong about three centuries later because he was passionate about Wang's calligraphy. The two extant versions of the Orchide Pavilion Preface, considered to be most important examples of traditional calligraphy are copies of Wang's original. Qiu Zhiejie wrote the Orchid Pavilion Preface about a thousand times on the same sheet of paper, which became completely black. His writing practice represents the search for origin in the absence of the original. Perhaps the origin is not in visible documents but rather in the cumulative memories and imagination of many individuals through a textualized history. If so, then culture, history, knowledge, and even human subjectivity are fundamentally rooted in contingency and discontinuity; we are just poor people at a fragmented historical moment in an institutionalized society. Qiu's philosophy states, 'If there has never been a complete condition of original freedom, the only freedom I can have is the freedom limited by institution"