Lu Yang Hell
Art Labor 2.0
570 Yongjia Lu, Bldg. 4, Shanghai, P.R. China
23 October – 17 November

Lu Yang is that rare figure able to cross seamlessly between the various genres and categories of contemporary culture that, far more so than elsewhere, have come to separate the various modes of production in Chinese creative life. A graduate of the new media program at the China Academy of Art in Hangzhou, she is supported by major figures in electronic art, experimental music, and digital culture, from Zhang Peili to Yao Dajuin, and she brings a healthy interest in the principles of scientific research (not to mention the accompanying aesthetics) to her work. A passion for manga, science fiction, and other forms of popular culture, however, ensures that her diagrammatic paintings, posters, and design objects remain accessible to unexpectedly broad audiences, adopted as a leading figure of the nascent East China creative scene along with a motley crew of animators and sneaker designers. Her work with biological issues and materials, on the other hand, sets her apart from most representatives of either new media or creative culture, earning Lu Yang a unique niche in contemporary art as a whole. Following a number of controversial but well-received group exhibitions in Shanghai and Hong Kong, this exhibition marks her first major solo exhibition, collecting representative pieces from many of her extensive series of work and offering a comprehensive picture of her practice at this moment. The space feels scattered and diverse, but this is one of the joys of an energetic young artist working in a multitude of different modes but nevertheless insisting on a finished quality in all of her projects. While we might expect Lu to come to a limiting decision at some point, moving towards either pop culture and design or fine art and video, but, for this moment, it is the schizophrenic nature of this very sexy, very “now” adventure through the mind of Expo-era Shanghai youth culture that lends relevance to every object and image.

“The Project of Seeking Cooperation with Scientific Teams” is a long-term initiative that hopes, at least rhetorically, to collaborate with scientists affiliated with major research institutions on bio-mechanical apparatuses involving discarded human body parts and live animals (we must recall that the discourse of cyborg sexuality was never as pervasive in China as we may be accustomed to thinking; this romance is relatively recent and still rather outre). “Kraftmause: Rat Desire Orchestra,” for example, seeks to train rodents to become physiologically addicted to pressing a certain button on an electronic musical instrument until they die of over-stimulation. “Reverse Bionic: Tendon Carnival” proposes to construct carnival games like toy-grabbing arcade machines out of human limbs. “Zombie Music Box: Underwater Frog Leg Ballet” shocks dead frog legs to the tune of a musical accompaniment. “Ultimate Energy Conversion: Instruman” consists of a prepared piano altered to insert acupuncture needles into the nerves of a living human strapped to the top. Finally, the newest plan, “Reverse Monitoring: The Ultimate Learning Tool,” keeps schoolchildren attentive by directly artificially stimulating their brains. For the moment, at least, these ideas exist as large-scale diagrams printed on canvas, appearing as analytical paintings of a sort that attempt to shock and inspire as much as instruct. For me, the schematic interest of this project consists of its hypothetical tone, the “what-if” that it inserts into our understanding of the artistic relationship.

“Family DIY” is exhibited in a series of similar diagrams, perhaps appropriating the graphic styles of safety instruction manuals pilfered from culpability-averse airlines. These comic situations offer instructions on various masturbatory sexual perversions, as reflected in the titles (and, more explicitly, in the accompanying drawings): “How to DIY Your Own Sanitary Towel Respirator,” “How to Kill a Part of Your Body DIY Nipple Breaking Off,” and “DIY Safe Suffocation.” The visual interest here is located in the way Lu Yang makes these fetishes appear so cut-and-dried, so risk-averse, so clean–almost boring. “Redesign of Reproductive System for Non-Mammals” attempts the same thing, preparing anatomical drawings of animals like fleas, frogs, moths, and ducks with labels insisting on a mammalian body map, but fails to succeed as fully. In the case of the latter, the simple swapping of names and locations without any alteration the original image is far less engrossing than the novel diagrams of perversions and machines.

Such problems are sidestepped in the more recent series “The Project of Pervert Crime DIY,” which involves the design of diagrams resembling sets for paper dolls. In the version exhibited here, “Coprophagia,” the viewer is presented with a two-dimensional scene of empty toilet stalls and, to the side, several human figures, tools, and piles of excrement. Text to the bottom instructs the user on how to position these elements in chronological order, but here the viewer is never invited to actually cut out and play with these images; the diagram as a whole is intended to remain intact on the gallery wall.

Less hypothetically, “The Project of Beats from Living Things” has actually found realization, at least in part, in the form of “Happy Tree,” an installation consisting of a dozen live amphibious animals like frogs and salamanders kept in glass balls arrayed over a tree-like metal structure also housing video cameras, electric wiring, and video monitors. The artist then uses compositions of experimental music to send instantaneous electric shocks through the vessels of water, such that the animals are tortured into “dancing” along to the non-tune. Meeting with no small measure of ethical resistance, Lu Yang eventually gave in and determined not to further exhibit the installation in its original format, choosing instead to create the video “Dictator-E.” Adopting the rhetoric of a dance music video, multiple channels of organic psychedelia are mixed with footage of the dancing animals in the original installation, here set to a piece of music composed by rising Hangzhou artist and producer Wang Changcun.

Continuing such humorous explorations into relationships between species, the more recent series “Biological Strike Back” involves posters and products advertising a set of plastic objects modeled after the bodies of blood-sucking animals like mosquitoes, leeches, ticks, and fleas. Here, however, the vessels that would contain human blood are replaced with plastic bags of a red energy beverage, such that the user can drink back, so to speak, what he or she has lost to nature. It is here that the necessity of a distinction between art and design emerges most clearly; for now, Lu Yang has been able to resolve this question with the mode of the diagrammatic poster-painting, keeping her interventions into the fabric of reality more or less theoretical. Art Labor, a young gallery that has recently expanded into a second space in the French Concession, may be just the right place for these experiments in crossover to happen, providing a new environment for chic and energetic work that need not shy away from the accessible or decorative.

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.

Introduction

The exhibition Resonance was initiated in early 2010 as an experiment in the conceptual underpinnings and practical manifestations of sound art as a genre and form in contemporary greater China. Growing out of a series of readings and conversations in Hong Kong with artists as varied as Yan Jun, Feng Jiangzhou, and Zhou Risheng, the final exhibition program included two installations by artists Samson Young, an artist and composer based in Hong Kong, and Yao Chung-Han, a sound artist based in Taipei. This selection of artists allows the experiment to step beyond the mainland sound art and experimental music scene, which is largely incoherent in its current free-for-all exploration of new sonic forms–a site of artistic freedom indeed, but also a difficult territory in which to reflect on the modes of sound already in use in the contemporary art community. Samson Young contributed a piece entitled “Beethoven Piano Sonata, nr. 1 – nr. 14 (Senza Misura)” (2010), a series of open circuit boards hung in rows on the gallery wall. Each board houses two LEDs and a speaker, each marking the tempo of a single movement of fourteen of Beethoven’s early piano sonatas. In the second gallery room, Yao Chung-Han installed an audiovisual piece entitled “I Will Be Broken” (2010), a suspended column of circular fluorescent lamps tied together with power cords that illuminates in a semi-random fashion and emits a prerecorded sequence of sounds. The two pieces engage in a dialogue of light and sound that confronts the tension between sound as aesthetic spectacle and sound as conceptual material, opening a productive conversation between styles and historical developments in the trajectory of sound in art.

Conversation

Robin Peckham (RP): I’d like to start with our initial thoughts when we set out to put this exhibition together. We were interested in how different cultural labels, specifically including music, experimental music, sound, and sound art, are distinguished in the Chinese context. During curatorial projects in Beijing and Shanghai, we found that artists and musicians working under these different labels all share the same live performance events and even exhibition contexts. I want to ask how the two of you see yourselves fitting into this system personally, and how you have experienced these distinctions in Hong Kong and Taipei respectively.

Samson Young (SY): In Hong Kong there is a circle of people working with, writing, and playing contemporary music, and that’s a very specific and self-contained scene. Then there’s a set of people outside this scene who also share a series of different and unrelated events, such as William Lane of the Hong Kong New Music Ensemble and myself. We both come from classical music backgrounds originally, but we’re also involved with other things, learning from different kinds of artists and musicians. The scenes are defined but the content of the work produced in each of these circles is not. As for defining my identity in all of this, I don’t have any strong feelings in terms of being a certain kind of artist working within the territory of sound art. I come out of the classical music world, but I make work that might function as contemporary music in the concert hall or something else entirely within the gallery context. No matter what the work is it should be evident that my interest lies in a certain set of ideas of music to some degree or another. I tend to resist being labeled as a sound artist because this term is so ideologically and politically loaded. There are so many problems with it that have yet to be resolved. Its aesthetics are still being defined, particularly the question of how to judge a work of art within this territory. The question is very much still under discussion. That’s one problem. The question of how to judge or test a work of art is often mixed up with this other question of “what is sound art,” where these should be very separate questions. A work might emit sound of some sort in a gallery setting, but the strategy of judging it through the criteria of sound rather than as conceptual or visual art is a very political process. It is a value judgment. It is very dangerous to judge the work within or using these unresolved debates over the nature of sound art, because it introduces all kinds of ideological questions. The discussion of aesthetics and the discussion of the identity of sound art should be separated. But now they exist within the same conversation, mixing the idea of a value judgment from the idea of a judgment of quality. We have a conversation and a discourse over these questions, but no sense of definition. If we introduce the question of “what is art,” then the entire project becomes compartmentalized and limited to its own territory without any further possibility of the expansion of the genre. As for how I define my own work, I will do some things within the gallery setting with the materials of sound and music, and people can label it as they please. But I don’t think I’ve answered the question.

RP: Yao, I have a more specific inquiry for you. My understanding of the Taipei sound art scene is derived from this narrative of Lin Chi-wei and his collaborators, particularly the Zero and Sound Liberation Organization of the 1990s, which was very much influenced by DIY and punk ethics and aesthetics in music and later art, while on the other hand today we have artists working in a vernacular influenced more by international new media, like Wu Chi-tsung, Wang Chung Kun, and Tseng Wei-Hao. In practice, how do these scenes overlap? Which of these artists do you commonly work or exhibit with?

Yao Chung-Han (YC): In Taiwan sound art has actually already been very clearly defined, or at least categorized, starting from Lin Chi-wei and on towards Wang Fujui, and then to us. Because we all come out of similar art academy backgrounds it appears as a very clear lineage from the outside, a certain school of sound art. The other major school emerges from the academies of music, working with more musical styles of production. Those are the two major directions. Both schools work with new technologies. Younger artists in both have become accustomed to using computers in their work, and both occasionally use musical instruments. Despite this clear demarcation of sound art from an art background and sound art from a music background, activities like our Lacking Sound Festival do try to blue these boundaries to some degree.

RP: You work in a collective called i/O Lab (no relationship to I/O Gallery). Who is involved in that group?

YC: Me, Wang Chung Kun, Chan Ming-Fang, Chang Yung-Ta, Huang Chung-Ying, and Yeh Ting-Hao.

RP: Do you all work in this more conceptual tradition of sound art, or do you also move into the areas in which Samson works, like composition or performance?

YC: More conceptual. It’s production. Our material is conceptual and the result should be thinking, with other relational and spatial concepts as well. In terms of composition, I think some of us make attempts occasionally, but our backgrounds are all in technology and art. Wang Chung Kun’s background is in sculpture, and mine is in architecture, but the other members are all working in some type of art or design. No one is trained in music.

RP: If we look specifically at the two pieces of work included in this exhibition, would you say that sound functions as a medium or a material here, or something else, some other concept?

SY: In my work, the concept is a musical one, but it emerges with a different function, as something closer to sound. The project contains 14 devices, each of which is playing the tempo of a single movement of Beethoven’s early piano sonatas, just as would a metronome. I am interested in this because self-proclaimed sound artists often have at least one shared point, which is that they understand that the definition of sound art is currently being determined. They understand that this is a fluid process, so the term sound art functions more as a signal of a certain territory. But on the other hand, they understand exactly what music is and what it does. From our academic training we’ve learned that music is not a fluid space, but oddly sound art uses music in its own process of self-definition, as an antithesis of sorts. There is a reactive method that is used to understand sound. So here I’m using something from music that could not possibly be more canonical, and then reducing it to something that could possibly be accepted within the territory of sound art. I want to see what happens through this gesture. It’s an experiment.

RP: Yao, what do you think in terms of your work?

YC: My work employs the relationship between sound and light as a catalyst for conceptual work, so I would say both of these elements function as materials. In the process of production I’m trying to tease out something more obscure through this relationship.

RP: So what role does sound play there? What is it doing?

YC: It is a point of origin for the concept of the work. Ultimately it is only a portion of the final piece, but it plays a very important role.

RP: Both of your works involve light in addition to the sound component. Why did you make the decision to include lighting elements for this kind of work that explores the nature of sound? Is there a necessary relationship between light and sound? Is light included for primarily conceptual or aesthetic reasons?

SY: After I had determined the concept, I thought of how to make something like but unlike a metronome, based on György Ligeti’s work, with all of the metronomes swinging back and forth. A piece of music traditionally has a beginning and ending, a structure, and isolating the tempo collapses this composition. Ligeti’s piece depends on both sound and movement. Putting together all those metronomes might not necessarily be mesmerizing per se, so what I wanted to do was to make something very visually mesmerizing. So I added these LED lights that blink with the tempo. It brings together the visual piece as a unified whole. The sound and the light both have the same function here. Without beginning and ending it becomes a mesmerizing loop. I wanted to preserve that collapse, but make it even more obvious.

RP: Yao, the relationship between light and sound in your work comes from a very different place. Without light you simply wouldn’t have sound. Is there a conceptual difference there as well?

YC: At the beginning I was experimenting with lights in my studio process. We’re so inundated now with audiovisual work, from performance to media, and I wanted to experiment in a way that was related to that. I was interested in the role sound played in the audiovisual, especially in the kind of musical performance that Alva Noto and that whole genre is working with. Why, in the information environment we live in, are we interested in that style of work? I think there’s actually a very artificial relationship between sound and light in many cases, so I became interested in more natural, more determined relationships, as with the physical properties of sound and light, and especially cases where the two are inextricable. That scenario is very different from our normal process of audiovisual design.

RP: In the early stages of discussing this exhibition concept, one of our theoretical points of departure was the recent work of Seth Kim-Cohen, who has been advocating a “non-cochlear sound art” in the tradition of Marcel Duchamp’s “non-retinal art” and in a sort of opposition to John Cage’s “sound-in-itself.” That is to say, he calls for a cognitive rather than aestheticized sound art, the kind of thing you might not even hear at all, or that might involve more conceptual elements. I think this is an interesting but somewhat unfashionable position to take now, after the visual or experiential turn of the last decade, though perhaps this applies to a lesser degree in new media circles further from the art world proper. But there is room for fascinating relationships between sound, the visual, and the conceptual that emerge in this new space. What do you think of these developments? Can sound art be pure sound, or does its status as art imply a necessary conceptual content?

SY: According to my understand of John Cage’s sound-in-itself, I think he had his own agenda, related to the heyday of European musical modernism, and his advocacy of pure sound has to be seen within that context, even though that context no longer exists. Musical modernism has passed. Sure, Cage was a pioneer of sorts, but we also have to put him in his historical place. He was not just a bombshell dropping out of nowhere as he is often treated when we cite him today. That’s the important part of this question. Music has never even been about pure sound, much less sound art. When I go to hear classical music I never spend much effort listening, but rather spend most of my time watching the conductor. Music was once live theater. The concept of music for music’s sake started with the romantic aesthetics of the late 19th century, when music was though of as the ideal way to attain bodily transcendence. But until the recording, there was no such thing as disembodied sound, no such thing as sound without the visual. I think if we reframe the question of “non-cochlear sound art” keeping this in mind, the answer becomes simple. When I write concert music I’m always taking into account different factors, including vision, light, interactivity, and so on. That’s a specific position towards the creation music. Within the gallery, we’re working in a different economy of circulation, but the position towards sound and the visual can be similar.

RP: For those of us with less of an understanding of the historical development of the contemporary music world, would you elaborate a bit on the passage of musical modernism?

SY: John Cage’s reaction against musical modernism was indeed a form of liberation, in terms of defining sound-in-itself outside of music, separating sound from the concept of music. He also liberated notation, assuring that without notation there could still be a sonic context. Finally, he assured that music need not happen only within the concert hall. It no longer needs to rely on the economy of the concert hall–and musical modernism was very much about the privileged position of the concert hall as an institution for sound-making. But the concert hall tradition is very much in crisis today, and the social context of the dominant European (specifically, Germanic) musical tradition out of which all this emerged no longer exists. For sound art to continue to fight the battle under the sound-in-itself bandwagon is to direct energy at a evil that no longer exist, it is ludicrous and toe-curling. People are doing very cool things in the concert hall these days, and no one really believes in the supremacy of Music with a capital M anymore. What it boils down to at the end is that some people choose to operate within the economy of the concert hall, while others flourish in the gallery space. This is, rather, a question of function. To mix the question of the function of production up with one of an aesthetic judgement would only lead to compartmentalization of sonic practices, not liberation.

YC: Studying with Yao Dajuin, we learned to work with sound and nothing else. But the question of the audiovisual within and in relationship to sound is important for me, so I work more with modes of perception in order to analyze forms of communication between these different elements, especially communication with the audience. This communication, as reflected in my work here, is not simply audio plus visual, but rather explores a very different set of reactions that take place when these two things combine. The object in the exhibition space plays a very specific role, based partially on its physical properties. I’m working with the spaces in which these different forms of communication adapt to each other.

RP: I feel that much of your work, and this piece in particular, is more about a visceral relationship with the body, not simply audiovisual but also physically present in terms of tension or even fear produced by the combination of sound and light. Is there a difference between this kind of relationship and more cognitive approaches to sound?

YC: It’s arousal, or excitement. This is a simulation of the sphere of mediation in which we live, populated with familiar objects and abstractions of the light and sound that inundate us. This is more direct, based on minimal and installation art rather than musical sound. It does not require too much contemplation, but rather enacts a different form of bodily communication within this sphere of media and information. Those pieces of information in the real world carry specific meanings, whereas when they are deprived of meaning we are pushed into a state of anxiety, a new model of communication. I’m interested in the reactions to this uncanny form of communication that does not respond to cognitive interpretation, but rather to direct experience.

RP: Your work contains a sensor such that when someone walks into the space there is a very specific order in which lighting elements become illuminated in relationship with the recorded sound of the piece. How is this order defined?

YC: The sound is intended to complement the “motion” of the lighting system, and the order of illumination is randomized according to the physical properties of the hardware. I’m interested in the moment of uncertainty in which even I don’t know if a given light will illuminate. It depends on temperature, voltage, and so on, and these factors inform the soundtrack. It’s like looking at the ocean. You can see the light moving over a given surface area of water and it appears as a random or abstract motion, but in reality it’s all determined by the physics of light, water, and reflection. It’s a partially intentional and partially incidental composition. A performative process.

RP: Have you ever worked with generative or algorithmic processing in your past projects?

YC: No. I don’t see any point to Max/MSP style processing. It’s an abdication of the responsibility or control of the artist, and doesn’t add any of the interesting elements of the physically randomized processes I described in relation this piece.

RP: This is something of a problem in the Chinese sound art scene now, and one of the things that made the exhibition concept so interesting for us. The ideas some of these artists start out with are often very interesting, but randomized processing without any aesthetic control is no substitute for turning a given observation into art via more proactive methods. The results often look awful in the exhibition space. There is always this question: why do you want to randomize this particular subject matter? What does generative processing do for this particular field recording? And that leads back to the question of non-cochlear sound art, because there’s certainly little of aesthetic interest there, only conceptual, but does it make for interesting art? What kind of conceptual standards are we applying to the aesthetics of sound?

SY: I am not sure if I agree that this is a prevalent problem in sound art in China, or just in sonic practices in general. My view is that randomization is a technique, and of course ultimately the artist is still responsible for the visual and sonic outcome of this process. To reveal this process and to put a spotlight on the process is to locate the work at the conceptual level, and the aesthetic judgment that the work demands will then be different as a result. But again I use the concert hall as an example to demonstrate how this discussion should be entirely out of vogue: it is very out of fashion to detail the random system or tone matrix or what have you with which a composer has arrived at the choices of pitches in a piece of composition. This hasn’t been stylish for well over two decades now, I would say. So why are we still asking these questions in sound art? And this is precisely what happens when you decontextualize sound art and to historicize it independent of the contemporary concert hall. Discussions that have already been carried out are repeated in a different space and time.

Participants

Yao Chung-Han: Born in Taipei and a 2008 graduate of the School of Art and Technology, Taipei National University of the Art, Yao Chung-Han is an active member of the new generation of sound artists in Taiwan, which includes the group i/O Lab of which he is a core member. His works are mostly concerned with sound, while at the same time searching for the inherent connections between video, installation, space, and various media. Recent exhibitions include Non-Places: Architecture of Pheromonal Presence, SCU, Taipei (2010); Emergencies!014, NTT ICC, Tokyo (2010); Tokyo Story, Wonder Site, Tokyo (2010); SuperGeneration@Taiwan, Today Art Museum, Beijing (2010), and Shanghai Art Museum, Shanghai (2009).

Samson Young: With formal training in classical music and a keen eye for visuals, spatial installations and new technologies, Samson Young has been known to combine his diverse interests into uniquely intermedia concert experiences. Beyond the classical concert stage, his creative output spans composition for symphony orchestra and live electronics to amusement ride-turned-interactive installation and multi-channel performance video. Recent exhibitions include: 18 Degrees of Acclimation, White Box Gallery, New York (2010); Beyond the Colony of Kitsch, Crossing Art Gallery, New York (2010); Hong Kong Biennale of Urbanism and Architecture, Hong Kong (2010); Prospectives International Festival of Media Art, University of Nevada (2009); and Last Intervention, Osage Gallery, Hong Kong (2009).

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.

Inter Art, a deservedly obscure photography space on the south side of 798 in Beijing, recently hosted the exhibition Remix and Share, organized by Creative Commons China and the web portal Artintern. The issue of copyright and open systems for alternative licensing is not an altogether immaterial one within the Chinese art world, particularly in light of increasing forays into the realm of digital production coupled with a lack of security or even interest in the circulation of artist materials like viewing copies and work reproductions. Unfortunately despite the productive efforts of Creative Commons in both the mainland and Hong Kong, this particular exhibition does not appear to contribute to this discussion in any significant manner. Curated by Wu Hong (not to be confused with Wu Hung) and Zhu Handong in a style that insists on covering a maximum area of wall space without regard for an overall aesthetic experience, the exhibition accepted applications from approximately 200 mostly obscure artists, selecting works by over 60 for the final presentation. Leading new media figures including Yao Dajuin, Yan Jun, and light artist Wu Xiaojun were also issued special invitations to participate.

Accompanied by the usual speeches and group photographs that accompany such bureaucratic curatorial work, the mandate of the exhibition seems more interested in the fact of its own existence than in the processes or possibilities associated with “remixing and sharing” under the Creative Commons model. Textual materials accompanying the project celebrate the notion that this group of artists could accept CC licensing; indeed, it seems that little if any concern was placed on a coherent exhibition plan, conceptual rigor, or aesthetic qualities of the works chosen for inclusion–which is truly regrettable, because an endeavor with this kind of institutional support has an exciting opportunity explore just how intellectual property, the figure of the remix, and networks of circulation operate within the international art world in general and specifically in the environment of 798 at the heart of the Beijing art scene. As it stands, the mere presentation of mediocre digital images as contemporary art in atrocious frames explicitly neglects the persistent fact of “sharing” within the Chinese context. Digital reproductions, both two- and three-dimensional, are routinely circulated from artist to gallery to media to the public, initially for promotional purposes but later out of sheer visual pleasure. This use case presents a fascinating, already-existing culture of circulation, and one that approaches questions central to the mission of Creative Commons in China.

Perhaps endemic to economies of contemporary visual art with its reliance on limited editions and patronage, such questions increase rapidly in significance with specifically material genres of Chinese contemporary art that utilize the matrix of labor and production to negotiate between concept and execution. For example, when Wu Xiaojun releases his “2025 Project” under a license requiring attribution, noncommercial use, and no derivatives, there are a number of components that are theoretically included in this package: documentation integral to the work (renderings of the installation), plans for its realization (the text of the sculpture), details of its execution (technical information and dimensions), and ultimately the underlying conceptual material are all considered part and parcel of the piece, differing from the simpler cases of design or illustration in which a single image stands alone and complete. To allow the reproduction of the work-assemblage that comprises of these components, under the stated restrictions, is a noble move that can indeed bring a greater transparency to the art world, if tricky issues of authenticity, certification, and editions can be solved without resorting to additional legal structures. On the other hand, what does it mean to release a concept to be represented without the possibility of derivative work? For Creative Commons in China, where does the work of art reside: in the material or in the inspiration?

It may be convenient to approach these questions from the perspective of work more traditionally suited to the Creative Commons model: Liu Wei’s “Purple Air” series offers an interesting scenario. These works, now numbering in the dozens, are oil paintings on canvas executed by moderately trained assistants with the aid of sketches based on projections of digital files, in this case created by the artist in Microsoft Paint. Here the issue of cultural metadata appears in a larger way. If, hypothetically, this digital file is available not only for distribution but also for derivative work, then any other artist’s interest in altering it exists not in the techno-utopian ideal of objectively moving creative discourse through a false discourse of progress, but rather in utilizing the “Liu Wei-ness” of the aesthetics, perhaps in satire or in reference to his past work. Within economies of highly-editioned circulation of art, particularly through galleries and their audiences, the sole interest of remix or secondary critique indeed lies with the conceptual but not necessarily aesthetic value of the prior work, a fact not necessarily true outside of China and certainly not applicable beyond the art world.

The exhibition at Inter Art fails to address these and other pressing theoretical problems related to further implementation of Creative Commons licensing, passing up an opportunity to embrace the already-existing practices of image piracy and digital reproduction in the cultural territory of the Chinese art world. Instead, the wholesale importation of occasionally outmoded practices native to the spheres of digital design into an inappropriate systematic and cultural context has presented yet another obstacle for the understanding and implementation of a praxis of open source culture, a problem that will not be reversed without significant and rigorous rethinking of the economies of circulation and understanding that regulate image production and reception in China.