As a sound artist, Ye Hui uses a variety of media (installation, performance, video) to question the social identity of the individual and its entanglement with different cultural and political contexts. Her work focuses on the socio-political aspects of the act of listening, exploring the connections between sound and various social phenomena in contemporary societies.
In this installation, Ye Hui used a rotating motor to move magnets attached to an acrylic glass bar. Pharmaceutical bottles filled with pins are placed on the underside of an acrylic panel. The movement of the magnets briefly pulls the pins upwards before they fall back to the bottom of the glass bottles, creating a gentle percussive sound. As the title suggests, It was so quiet that the pins dropped could be heard... requires attentive listening and quiet reception on the part of visitors if they are to perceive the full subtlety of the sounds generated by the work. The artist, explaining the origin of her project, states: “The installation was inspired by the idiomatic expression 静可闻针, which specifies a listening situation within absolute quietness so one could even hear a pin drop. On the other hand, such kind of quietness probably only exists in one's imagination and the idioms 静可闻针 is indeed the description of a (collective) perception of not only acoustic, but also psychological condition. Therefore, the installation can be understood as the physical amplification of the linguistic/idiomatic expression 静可闻针.”
Nicolas Ballet
