Fominaya, Alvaro Rodriguez, and Lee, Michael, eds., Who Cares? 16 Essays on Curating in Asia. Hong Kong: Para/Site Art Space with Studio Bibliotheque and seed | projects, 2010. 187pp. ISBN: 9789889896393 (pbk.).

We find in Hong Kong something of a curatorial anxiety: there are very few makers of exhibitions active in the local art scene, and, though this is entirely in keeping with the small scale and number of available exhibition spaces, intimate connections between institutional academic research and critical writing in the territory lead to a general sensation of lack in this regard. It is fitting, then, that the leading nonprofit art space in South China, Para/Site, should team up with the omnipresent Jockey Club Charities Trust for a curatorial training course purporting to link international curators and writers with emerging local practitioners. This publication represents an outcome of that venture (perhaps more productive than the concluding exhibition), collecting essays on the state of curating in Asia by instructors and others involved. Taking advantage of the position of Hong Kong within an English-language discourse of international art in a Chinese context, this could be a fascinating project for exhibition practice across greater China.

A broad range of ideas are introduced here, many familiar but some, on occasion, quite novel. We read of the shock of the European curator operating in China for the first time, as Alvaro Rodriguez Fominaya describes how curators function as agents and alternative spaces as galleries. Singaporean artist Michael Lee outlines a range of roles, from art direction and publicity to administration and writing. Lee Weng Choy speaks of wonder. Most interestingly, Jans Hoffmann calls for a return to experimentation within the space of the gallery space rather than beyond it, a conservative notion that has become a minority position. Some of the more valuable perspectives here come from unexpected angles: artist Cedric Maridet writes on the necessity of an amateur approach to context-specificity in the sphere of sound installation, while art fair director Magnus Renfrew warns curators against becoming the ultimate consumers in the pursuit of the new.

The most striking summary of the publication can be found within the brief description on the rear cover: “ … these texts constitute primary notes towards ‘curatorial criticism,’ a subfield of cultural criticism that identifies the new in curating today.” This self-conscious positioning of the work as explicitly “curatorial criticism” rings true with the tone of virtually all of the essays included: the close reader will find banished from these pages any lingering aroma of the modernist idea of the heroic critic as an author of a certain literature in her own right, replaced with the cold and scripted discourse production of curatorial writing. Many of us working in these fields today may harbor sympathies for both ideologies of the pen, but it would appear that the time for a definitive choice between textual production and word craft may be close at hand.

Yeung, Yang, ed., Around (Pocket:1). Hong Kong: soundpocket, 2010. 370pp. ISBN: 9789881948014 (pbk.).

There has been a surprising resurgence of interest in sound art in Hong Kong over the past few years, spurred by a combination of factors from a strong research program in certain university departments to the fact that the event-based form of many sound exhibitions suits the transient cycle of artists circulating through the city. This charge has been led by the organizer Yeung Yang and her nonprofit group soundpocket, which stages an annual festival known as Around Sound. The publication at hand collects essays from participants in and observers of the 2009 iteration of the festival; as Yeung writes in her introduction, this slow cycle allows for the “luxury of ambiguities and inconveniences” implicit in such efforts of retrospective reflection. Aroundsound emphasizes not sound art as we know it but rather “sound-in-art and sound-as-art,” or “listening-to, listening-before, and listening-after,” and this volume likewise contains a range of ideas in at least four languages, all packaged in a flawlessly translated, edited, designed, and printed container. Sound artist and organizer Yan Jun, for example, contributes his daily journal entries from the festival, while artist Edwin Lo and musician produce textual collages of their thoughts and impressions of the event. Others, including Eugene Tan, Carlo Fossati, and Cedric Maridet, author critical readings of particular works involved.

The only problem is that virtually all of these pieces are dominated by the same register or tone, ultimately reflecting only a single side of current cultural production in sound. Most of the writing anthologized in the book drifts between the romantic and the poetic–not an illegitimate perspective, for sure, but certainly a boring one without any serious divergences to balance out the overall structure of the project. In a lengthy text from Jerome Joy, himself a performer in the festival, we find a more analytical text that offers a healthy reprieve in its historical and theoretical contextualization of multiple performance events, while Felix Hess similarly offers a narrative of his own arrival at sound practice through science, theory, and personal experience. Organizations like soundpocket inevitably emphasize the sensible and the literary as they urge their audiences to focus on neglected soundscapes and practices of listening, but their monopoly on the discourse of sound art threatens to negate entirely the technical, musical, critical, and curatorial accounts of the genre–readings that once eclipsed the emotional and empirical experiences of sound. Somehow, perhaps in the next edition of this publication, a balance must emerge.

During a recent debate over sound art that seemed to grip several quarters of the Hong Kong art world for the better part of the summer of 2010, one of the recurring topics of discussion was the relationship between art and music. Dominated by figures emerging from the contemporary classical and experimental spheres, however, this has been a distinctly theoretical conversation, revolving around the parallel but temporally offset historical development paths taken by the contexts of music—in and beyond the concert hall—and art—in and beyond the white cube of the gallery. Setting aside, for a moment, the many sensitive and intelligent artists working with sound as material, medium, and genre, of which there are many in China–from Yan Jun in Beijing to Yao Dajuin in Taipei and Cedric Maridet in Hong Kong–one particularly overlooked territory may yet contribute something additional to the field: that of independent popular music.

This is a fraught topic, one that often devolves all too quickly into hype for “genre-spanning hipsters” and other distasteful members of the fray labeled “creative China.” On the other hand, this was also, until recently, a marker of some cultural resentment, especially as the period that saw musicians like Zuoxiao Zuzhou sharing live-work space in the East Village with artists like Ai Weiwei gave way to the auction bubble for Chinese contemporary art and international obscurity for domestic music. For the historical background to this transition, see the important scholarly work on politics, identities, and relationships within and between these two communities carried out by critic and curator Maya Kóvskaya. The topic of this column, however unfortunately, is both less expansive and more prosaic, attempting to examine several of the more recent instances of exchange between contemporary art and independent pop music in an effort to determine what further dialogue might be able to accomplish, and what alterations to this process may be necessary.

In Hong Kong, at least two of the leading artists working locally also lead independent bands. Nadim Abbas, who has lent keyboard and vocals to the disco punk and modulated noise quarter A Roller Control since 2008, is recognized primarily for his visual work, as with the project installed in the Hong Kong Museum of Art exhibition The Hong Kong Seven that compared the varying shapes of window barriers to Rorschach blots and assigned a new superhero identity for each. Having completed advanced formal studies in literary theory and being widely read in critical modalities, Abbas represents a more intellectual pole of the Southern Chinese art scene. With A Roller Control, on the other hand, he fabricates walls of noise uniquely suited to art contexts—which is appropriate, given that the best live music venues in the city more or less recreate the rote/cookie-cutter post-industrial shells from which gallery spaces are created. This is a new incarnation for the group—which previously emphasized more danceable styles—but this seems likely to stick given the increasing preponderance of large-scale cultural festivals, exhibitions, and other events, even as longstanding performance venues like the Fringe Club fade into the background of the local scene.

Also in Hong Kong is the part-time resident, Adrian Wong, who teaches for a portion of the year at the University of California in Los Angeles. He has just recently taken the helm of an energetic group that has seen a quick succession of names, and is at the moment working under the label Fantastic, I Love You. Born and educated in the United States, Wong brings the tactics of rigorous archival and scientific research coupled with a crude sense of humor to the Chinese art world, thus rarely fitting in amongst the more subdued artists emerging from the official Hong Kong art education system. His latest project may be the consummate demonstration of this approach, investigating sobriety as a parameter of expressive performance and offering an unbridled space of energy to a quiet scene.

Artists moonlighting as musicians (or musicians making art, or dilettantes trying out a bit of everything) are nothing new, of course; this is a long-standing tradition in many parts of the world, and the nexus of independent music and experimental art has played an integral role in the historical development of scenes from Los Angeles of the 1960s to the Lower East Side of the 1980s. In Hong Kong, however, this offers new possibilities for less systematic, more purely affective or sensory approaches to the creation of cultural objects, creating a plane of exchange removed from the straitjacketed processes of traditionally insular studio practice that is derived from an odd imagination of scholarly painting implicit to the post-colonial ideologies of education at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, from which (until recently) the majority of practicing local artists graduated. We are also beginning to note similar trends in mainland China, though the quality of musical practice in that situation is highly variable.

The most interesting example at the moment may be the relationship between N12, a group of painters who studied together at the Central Academy of Fine Arts that once included now well-known figures like Qiu Xiaofei and Wang Guangle, and Shanshui, a record label operated by Sun Dawei that represents 8-bit and intelligent dance music artists like Sulumi (a stage moniker for Sun himself), Liman, Dead J, and B6. Recognizing that commercial success had bolstered visual art long before music, a nebulous organization known as the N12 Foundation has offered funding for publicity and compilation publications for the label, while Shanshui events have also seen participation from a crowd of like-minded painters and other artists. This cooperative relationship is no doubt spurred on by the relationship between Cao Yang, the lead singer of the respected electronic rock band Exit A, and N12, though it should be said that there is also a certain overlap in terms of aesthetic sensibility, as with A Roller Control and Fantastic, I Love You in Hong Kong.

Other attempts at cross-genre synergy, as with those by the Modern Media music critic, Jian Cui, the second-rate punk musician, Wang (Gia) Yue, of Hang on the Box, and others to present themselves as artists, often under the aegis of exhibitions and markets known as “Mary Inn” and organized by You Yang, have fallen remarkably flat, offering stunningly naive interpretations of the discourses of contemporary art. Falling into this latter category, too, would be the “graphic art” with which many self-consciously hip foreign observers and young Chinese are enamored, works that offer nothing whatsoever for intelligent viewers and do little to enhance the music, design, and apparel with which it is associated. Much of this activity is carried out in hopes of building wider markets for this material, an explicitly statistics-oriented commercial aim for which serious artists and musicians have little patience.

These highly visible missteps notwithstanding, the transferral of artistic energies into music (and, more occasionally, of musical energies into art, though this asymmetry derives more from the primary position of independent music in the popular consciousness rather than the elitism of high culture) can be extraordinarily productive in venting some of the pretensions attendant to the professional practice of art in a society largely ignorant of and removed from international cultural histories. This can occur through the changing relationships between subject and audience, a distinction that has attracted so much commentary in the literature that it requires no further theoretical articulation here. In the art exhibition, which is typically open to the public but limited to geographically marginal sites, entities that range from environments to objects and images rarely ever offer personal presence, no matter how impressive they may appear. In this model, such phenomena are intended for review by a large audience but, ultimately, for consumption by only a minority. In the musical performance, live human bodies present a rehearsed but transient experience funded jointly by all viewers. These two divergent models indeed can lend theoretical support for experiments in configuration within both distinct discourses; the key to success lies primarily within focus on the assemblage of the scene, as outlined here, and aesthetic coherence or at least stylistic consistency. This is where so many musicians-cum-artists fail: a lack of respect for disciplinary histories and boundaries allows for an undiscerning desire for linkage and connection between scenes and individuals, thereby bringing in cultural products with no meaningful relationship to the work at hand. Fortunately, the art scenes of Hong Kong and mainland China alike find in the karaoke lounge a litmus test pertaining to the viability of this crossover, a filter that discriminates between the endlessly devolving and overlapping categories of artist, musician, consumer, and pretender.

Marcel Duchamp inaugurated one of the manifold lineages of experimental art in the twentieth century with a push towards what he termed “non-retinal art,” launching a plea for the conceptual and the contextual; clearly, these were fertile seeds indeed. Duchamp’s thesis called for a break with art that functioned primarily on a visual level, if such a thing existed at all, but it was not long before a counterpoint emerged in the parallel narratives of minimalism and, ultimately, op art. But the non-retinal for Duchamp was more than this guarded dualism; in fact, this phrase was coined with particular reference to art that took as its primary concern the making and definition of art, a history that, in some models, reached its apex between the 1913 Armory Show and Malevich’s 1921 monochromes. Although this latter painter may have been working at the notion from the opposite direction, Duchamp insisted on the primacy of the mind, if not concept itself, over the visual plane.

It would be absurd, of course, to suggest that the visual plane was categorically dominant throughout Western art history prior to Duchamp’s intervention. Likewise, the field of music, from classical through to the avant-garde, rarely ever entailed a purely aesthetic experience. Nevertheless, it found its iconoclast in the person of John Cage, even if his revolution proved to enact a different situation entirely. This revolution was later wrapped up in the phrase “sound-in-itself,” although Cage himself rarely if ever employed the term, and it offered a wholly transcendental proposition: that “pure sound,” distinct from both music and noise, could mobilize a universalizing function. (This may be one of the root concepts behind Boris Groys’s oft-cited “weak universalism,” which, appropriately enough, discusses the monochromatic Malevich works as a major influence.) Cage also wished to dethrone the privileged status of the visual, resisting the popular model of sensation in which most auditory composition must invoke or emerge from some corresponding visual phenomenon.

This restitution of the aural found an unlikely second wave in Derek Jarman, the cult film director known within the art world as much for his garden as for his collaborations with sound artists and pop musicians on projects that could only loosely be termed music videos. Most pertinently, his haunting last film, Blue, consists of seventy-nine minutes of saturated blue and poetic audio narration; composed as the artist himself was going blind due to AIDS-related complications, the piece represents a struggle with the hegemonic terms of visuality, seemingly closing off the painterly films of Jarman’s earlier career. Derived from the monochromes of Yves Klein, themselves a lush if psuedo-spiritual rejoinder to the non-retinal Malevich, this continuous frame of blue has come to occupy an iconic position in the trajectory of queer theory. One critic has even set the soundtrack-oriented film in opposition to the opening lines of the Metaphysics: from Aristotle’s “above all others the sense of sight” to Jarman’s “pray to be released from the image.”

This last critical attempt may come across as hyperbolic, but there is no denying these ruptures in the narratives of genre and style. Potentially equaling these incidents in terms of gravity and import is Seth Kim-Cohen’s 2009 publication of the tome In the Blink of an Ear. Therein, the artist and scholar argues for a rereading of sound art history, looking towards a “non-cochlear” approach to sound art that would owe more to Duchamp than to the currently dominant justifications of sound-in-itself. Kim-Cohen cites the militant medium-specificity of high modernism as a key culprit in the transformation of sound art into a form of music culturally acceptable independent of context, and in response gestures towards the intertextuality of virtually all sonic artifacts produced today: the friction between sight and sound is collapsed, instead productively giving way to a biologically but not conceptually phenomenological model of perception.

The thesis may seem overwrought to observers of contemporary art, who will be familiar with the use of sound as a component of any number of artists otherwise working in the rhetoric of the conceptual. Indeed, sonic moving parts and, increasingly, speaker cones have become an often requisite element of such installations in the expanded field: one need only recall Bruce Nauman’s “Days,” which premiered in the 2009 Venice Biennale with several rows of whispering speakers, or, closer to home, Adrian Wong’s talking ducks and mumbling stuffed figures, or even the collaborative project recently installed by Vito Acconci and Ai Weiwei. But, like video art that happens to include an audio track, these projects do not consciously or rigorously engage with the notion of sound as medium, nor do they operate within the history of the last half-decade of what has become known as sound art.

Unfortunately, any use of sonic properties within contemporary art practice is often handed the mantle of successful sound art, even if the work in question more properly belongs to another genre entirely. In mainland China, for example, experimental musicians, noise performers, and sound artists are quite often all included in the same festival programs, live shows, and exhibitions: excluded by the art establishment on the one hand and the institutions of classical music and the performing arts on the other, this motley crew has successfully created a scene, but all at the expense of serious engagement with the material itself. In the midst of a deluge of field recordings and patches for the absurdly pervasive (and almost always pirated) Max/MSP/Jitter software package, critics have begun to wonder: Why are all of these artists using sound in the first place? How do they differentiate their practices from music or sculpture? What are they discovering about sound and how this material fits into the narrative arcs of the conceptual and the retinal?

At the limit case of “non-cochlear sound” or conceptual sound art, we approach the asymptotic value of sound without sound. Sound, removed from sound art, does not necessarily lead to the purely conceptual; indeed, it could be an intensely sensory experience in its own right, as with Stephen Vitiello’s “Fear of High Places and Natural Things” (2004). In this installation, a set of speaker cones hang from the gallery ceiling, emitting no tones audible to the human ear but nevertheless vibrating constantly. There is a sense of the uncanny at work here, imparting a feeling of nervous terror that functions physically through sound waves but aesthetically through both the visual and the tactile. Clearly borrowing the vocabulary of sound art in the form of the speaker cones, the piece nevertheless moves beyond sound proper–or perhaps defines the territory at stake in this distinction.

Similarly, former rock musician turned multimedia dramatist Feng Jiangzhou transforms sound into pressure with his installation “The Discipline in Four Parts” (2008). In a darkened cylindrical space, the visitor sits passively on a short stool surrounded by a steel cage on which some twenty speakers are positioned, emitting vast multi-channel compositions designed to disorient and construct an alternative sensation of space. Sound remains very much present in this project, but moves from a one-dimensional sonic experience to a hacking of auditory sensation for the purpose of building an invisible architecture defined by a medium rarely called upon to play such a role. Confidence in a knowable conceptual origin is disoriented in tandem with the simultaneous displacement of sonic origin. Visual deprivation may be a simplistic maneuver, but here the psuedo-musical compositions that recreate the space can be analogous to the psueo-poetic narration that recreates the visual for Derek Jarman.

Although critic-cum-musician-cum-curator-cum-artist Yan Jun launched his artistic practice with the a series of field recordings transferred directly from released on his experimental record label to the exhibition space in a darkened room, he has since moved on to an increasingly interesting series of ventures into the space of sound within contemporary art, aided by the curators of Vitamin Creative Space. In one sculpture formally resembling the Stephen Vitiello installation noted above, a lone speaker cone sits perched on top of speaker case housing; the cone vibrates and even jumps to the low rumbling sound of a heartbeat of some kind, but it is visually unclear whether this sound is actually emitted by the housing below or the cone above. This sense of ambiguity frees the piece as a whole from becoming too closely tied to the auditory experience, drawing forth an almost physical compulsion to touch the vibrating elements personally.

Approaching the sound barrier from the other direction, Hong Kong composer and artist Samson Young strips down music to some of its most basic elements, ultimately transforming it into sound. For the installation “Beethoven Piano Sonata, nr.1 – nr.14 (Senza Misura)” (2010), the artist has programmed forty-seven exposed circuit boards, each one simultaneously ticking and blinking to the tempo of a single movement of all of Beethoven’s early fourteen piano sonatas. The effect is mesmerizing both visually and sonically, recalling the aesthetics of György Ligeti’s Poème Symphonique for 100 metronomes more than anything else, but simultaneously stripping down such musical experiments in timing and composition to a naked framework of pure temporality, creating a totalizing experiment that verges on pure sound without reducing itself to the exercises in taste typical of sound-in-itself.

The goal of this curatorial program, writ large, is to reexamine the underpinnings of the characteristic styles, concepts, and devices that have come to represent the genre of sound within the field of contemporary art. In this vision, sound moves from medium or material to a more historically and contextually loaded territory, an object that can no more reject the lineages of both Cage and Duchamp than it can avoid participation in the carnival of post-conceptualism altogether. The hope shared by the artists and writers described above, however, is that this notion of sound can find a possibility for expression and consideration in an anti-essentialist space defined as much by the cognitive as by the aural, and as much by critical reflection as by enthusiastic volunteerism. It is a goal that should resonate with other once-struggling genres, and it will no doubt continue to resonate through the gallery spaces that propose to contain it.

“Resonance: Exhibition, Performance, Talks”
Published as publicity materials by Input/Output Gallery. This text describes the specific exhibition program that emerged from the critical discussions mentioned above.
Text by Robin Peckham and Rachel Connelly.

Resonance is an exhibition about the word sound. It is about the sound of the word, the meaning of the word, and the usage of the word; that is to say, it asks what sound is, how sound is used, and what sound can do. One may wonder why an artist would choose to work with sound, as opposed to music or visual art, but would find that answers are rarely forthcoming.

Resonance attempts to present an abstracted territory for this dialogue, stripping sound down to its most basic elements; the same elements that contribute to the other creative modes and methods in question. Just as Seth Kim-Cohen, working in the Duchampian conceptual tradition in his book In the Blink of an Ear, has called for an art of “non-cochlear sound” opposed to the “sound-in-itself” associated with John Cage, this project wonders what happens when the sound is removed from sound art. As an exhibition, it engages in the transformation of music into sound, of sound into pressure, and of the sonic into an anti-essentialist conceptual program.

The goal of this curatorial program, writ large, is to re-examine the underpinnings of the characteristic styles, concepts, and devices that have come to represent the genre of sound within the field of contemporary art. In this vision, sound moves from medium or material to a more historically and contextually loaded territory, an object that can no more reject the lineages of both Cage and Duchamp than it can avoid participation in the carnival of post-conceptualism altogether. Input/Output Gallery presents the works of two artists currently working through this problem: Samson Young, the Hong Kong composer, scholar, and artist known for his contributions to everything from game art to new classical performance, and Yao Chung-Han, the Taipei-based sound artist widely recognized for his research into the breakdown points of the technological matrix that surrounds us. Both are representatives of the new wave of emerging sound cultures across greater China and into the international sphere, offering new points of entry into these questions.

Yao Chung-Han here includes the installation, “I Will Be Broken” (2010), a floor-to-ceiling suspended column of circular fluorescent lamps tied together in a mesmerizing totem with its own power cords. As the piece slowly strangles itself into forced obsolescence with the surges of electricity through both body and frame, its lighting sources fluctuate along with a soft, uncanny buzzing. Although the visual spectacle and conceptual nervousness are at first domineering, the work functions primarily on the level of and through the medium of sound, emitting an atonal and unpredictable sound that requires attention by virtue of its low volume and commands consideration based on its ever-evolving almost organic state. Here, sound is a by-product that comes to both lead and stand in for an abstract choreography of relevance and terror that plays out on the stages of perception, ultimately creating an un-composed cacophony through physical experience.

Approaching the sound barrier from the other direction, Samson Young strips down music to some of its most basic elements, ultimately transforming it into sound. For the installation “Beethoven Piano Sonata, nr.1 – nr.14 (Senza Misura)” (2010), the artist has programmed forty-seven exposed circuit boards, each one simultaneously ticking and blinking to the tempo of a single movement of all of Beethoven’s early fourteen piano sonatas. The effect is mesmerizing both visually and sonically, recalling the aesthetics of György Ligeti’s Poème Symphonique for 100 metronomes more than anything else, but simultaneously stripping down such musical experiments in timing and composition to a naked framework of pure temporality, creating a totalizing experiment that verges on pure sound without reducing itself to the exercises in taste typical of sound-in-itself.

I/O Gallery is proud to offer a stage for these explorations of physical sensation, cognition, composition, temporality, and destruction. Conceived in collaboration with the Society for Experimental Cultural Production, this exhibition–along with an associated series of performances and talks featuring Yang Yeung, Cedric Maridet, and Yao Dajuin among others–hopes to throw into relief the problems that mark discourses of sound, art, music, and new media today, contributing to an ongoing conversation.