Over the past two decades, sound art in China has experienced a creative revival that touches on a number of themes: the tension between the audible and the inaudible; the relationship between acoustic vibrations and the environment; and the socio-political dimension of the act of listening. At the same time, these practices represent a meeting point between different artistic cultures, with musicians taking over the installation or visual artists using sound to compose works while proposing original images or graphic works to accompany their productions. Numerous formal and conceptual innovations have thus created a new relationship with auditory attention in accordance with the specificity of the artists. As a result, their works are now circulating around the world in various forms. Initially, this took the form of compilations such as China: The Sonic Avant-Garde [Fig. 1], produced in 2003 by the label Post-Concrete, founded in 1997 by Dajuin Yao, a professor, curator and artist at the China Academy of Art in Hangzhou, to promote Chinese sound art on a global scale . In addition, festivals such as “Sounding Beijing: International Electronic Music Festival” (The Loft New Media Art Space, Beijing, 1-4 November 2003), the first international sound and new media event in China, brought together Chinese and Western artists. It took place three years after the first part of “Sound” (Contemporary Art Museum in Beijing, 2000), a group exhibition conceived at the initiative of curator and artist Li Zhenhua, which marked the public recognition of sound as an artistic medium in mainland China at “a time when neither Western theories of sound nor institutional models of sound art as an independent genre were available to the mainland art world ”, according to researcher Jing Wang, associate professor of sound studies and art anthropology at Zhejiang University (Hangzhou). And since 2013, the exhibition series “Sound Art China: Revolutions per Minute” – the subject of another compilation – has continued to highlight Chinese sonic creations abroad (notably in New York ), but also in Shanghai and Hong Kong. This project, developed by Dajuin Yao, whose activities at the China Academy of Art (a participatory sound art programme, festivals, exhibitions…) have contributed to promoting the Chinese scene, is also developing on the fringes of cultural institutions, as demonstrated by the recent festival “A Bunch of Noise”, the first edition of which took place in Shanghai in 2023, bringing together a radical generation of “noise” artists [Fig. 2].
These various references testify to the importance of a diverse scene made up of many creators, some of whom are prominently featured in the exhibition “I Never Dream Otherwise than Awake: Journeys in Sound”, including Wang Changcun, Hui Ye, Sun Wei and Samson Young. The multiple universes of these artists show how outdated the all-encompassing term “sound art”, which is often used to lump them together in a rather hasty Western reading of their work, has become. All the limitations of this concept become apparent when we consider the artistic categories presented by Jing Wang in his book Half Sound, Half Philosophy: “sound installations, sound in performance-oriented conceptual art, sound machines/object installations, public sound art, and sound and net art ”. Although they are not exhaustive and may overlap in the work of certain artists, these variations clearly underscore the richness of the mediums used. In his article “Sound Art in China: Revolutions per Minute”, Dajuin Yao also questions the term “sound art” and its Western definition: in his view, this term differs from “cultural listening” in China, which draws on an ancient interpretive tradition that emphasises multidisciplinarity. Yao points out that “the Chinese interest in sound has never been in the sounds themselves or acoustics, but in their correlations, references, and the interplay of phenomena. Sound, music, and tuning have been correlated to cosmology, astronomy, astrology, philosophy, medicine, and so forth ”. While Western sound art can be traced back to a modern tradition firmly rooted in an official art history – the Italian Futurist Luigi Russolo’s The Art of Noises (1913) comes to mind, as do the sonic explorations of pioneering artists such as John Cage, Max Neuhaus, Alvin Lucier and Bill Fontana – Yao’s approach links contemporary Chinese sound art to a cultural phenomenon that is “an extension of one of the oldest and most important heritages in world auditory culture ”. However, a new generation of artists is attempting to mitigate this comparison through the lens of humour: Yan Jun, a poet, musician and independent curator, ironically describes Chinese experimental music as “loser’s music ”, as theorist Jing Wang reminds us. In the 2017 compilation There is no music from China [Fig. 3], created with the musician and promoter Zhu Wenbo, and in the 2020 compilation Music will ruin everything, Yan Jun presents “a humorous negation of categorical identities of the national and the musical ” both in the compositions of the pieces and in their titles. However, these initiatives can be seen as part of Chinese listening culture, albeit a small part. According to Jing Wang, its origins lie in the philosophical concept of qi: “In ancient China, qi was considered both the vital source breath for life and the driving force in the cosmic world. Qi was used to describe the human body as used in qi-blood, explaining how the human is a part of the resonant cosmic cycle, forming into a union with the heaven and earth. The notion of qi refers to the ceaseless fluctuation, interpenetration, and transformation of yin-qi and yang-qi. Through different historical periods, qi, from a vague idea, was developed into a cosmological, aesthetic, social, medical, moral concept, and eventually a philosophical system, reaching its maturity in the Song Dynasty ”.
The complex origins of sound creation on the contemporary Chinese scene reveal a subtle balance between traditional and electronic culture. This relationship can be seen in Dajuin Yao’s installation Geophone Nanking (2005), which recreates a military surveillance device used during battles in China two thousand years ago, but also in Yan Jun’s work in his performance How to Eat Sunflower Seeds (2011-2013), an exploration of popular culture, and in Seeds Dialogue [Figures 4 and 5], “a quadraphonic installation playing back the sound of four persons cracking sunflower seeds, a popular Chinese snack and pastime, as if in a conversation ”. Using the fabric of everyday life as a medium, Yan Jun has developed a novel approach to sound performance – a language, which, for Dajuin Yao, “has always been the core and soul of Chinese culture. Acoustically speaking, for artists using language as sound samples for signal processing, the Chinese language family, being tonal (words sharing the same sound are differentiable only through pitch variations) and with numerous dialects and regional variations, offers a tremendously rich resource for all types of experimentation in digital signal processing and modulation ”. While some artists make language the central medium of their work, other musicians are exploring new ways of communicating, such as Samson Young, who proposes new protocols for performing classical music repertoires. In his piece Muted Situation #22: Muted Tchaikovsky’s 5th (2018), the sounds of the instruments used to play Pyotr Tchaikovsky’s Symphony No. 5 are suppressed to make way for a new sonic environment in which only the gestures of the performers, at one with their instruments and their scores, are audible. In this silent version, this classical work is deconstructed to create a political object that reveals the efforts of each member of the orchestra. This unveiling of the imperceptible takes other forms in the artist’s work. Art historian Alenka Gregorič, describing the video Sonata for Smoke (2021) [Fig. 6], which “focuses on the ordinarily invisible instruments used in creating video and film, thereby showing how the sound of a performing body is recorded”, explains that Samson Young “invite[s] the viewer to closely observe sound as an intensely present element, [and] shifts our focus from the visible to the invisible, from the obvious and self-evident to a search for the origins of soundscapes. Sonata for Smoke is both a recording of sound and a creation of a new image in which image is subordinated to sound ”. This link between sound and image manifests itself in a cross-fertilisation of artistic cultures, as Samson Young, who is trained in musical composition, covers a wide range of practices in his work: performance, sound, video and drawing.
This phenomenon of hybridisation can also be found in the work of many Chinese artists living in mainland China and abroad. In this respect, the musician Pan Daijing also embraces a variety of disciplines, striving to renew the codes of performance in addition to her compositions and concerts. This is particularly true of In Service of a Song (2017), in which she invites the audience to experiment with the possibilities of sonic imagination [Fig. 7]. Four improvised performances of thirteen minutes each took place on consecutive days in a transparent, soundproof box at the House of World Cultures in Berlin. Pan Daijing shared this box, a structure surrounded and filled with earth up to the ankles, with several sculptures, gymnastic rings and her pet turtle, the only other living organism to witness the performance from inside. In the second phase, the work was transformed into an exhibition, in which a four-channel video recording of the event was presented alongside the sculptural installation, extending the meaning of the performance into the space of the Isabella Bortolozzi gallery in Berlin. In Service of a Song sought to liberate the listening experience by inviting the audience to focus on their own auditory imagination, while proposing a new representation of the figure of the musician through performance. This approach feeds into a segment of the Chinese electronic music scene, most notably represented by Menghan Wang, Wei Wei (aka Vavabond) and Torturing Nurse , in whose work harsh noises interact directly with the artists’ bodies, in sonic landscapes that reflect the hyper-industrialised world of contemporary China. Suffused by an abundance of urban sounds, from subway muzak to smartphone alerts, the frequencies of China’s over-connected society are being appropriated by a new wave of visual artists and performers sensitive to this diffuse sonic influence. While the China Sound Unit collective had begun to address the growing importance of mobile phones in users’ daily lives in the late 1990s, iPhones quickly became the target of Chinese composers. In 2012, Wang Changcun, a member of the collective who is adept at field recording, created a sound art app for smartphones called Cicadas, which generates the synthesised sound of cicadas that users can modulate at will. Subverted from its original function, the smartphone proposed a new connection with nature, gradually being eroded by the hegemony of technology and the constant noise of the global city. This object made it possible to move from the discomfort of hearing to an unexpected state of acoustic comfort, establishing a new relationship with listening and encouraging creative minds to examine sound in a different way.
Captions
Fig. 1 – Compilation China: The Sonic Avant-Garde, Berkeley (CA), Post Concrete, 2005, compact disc.
Fig. 2 – “A Bunch of Noise” festival poster at System, Shanghai, 4 April, 2024. Artwork by Shuangfa Dong.
Fig. 3 – Compilation There is No Music from China, Beijing, Zoomin’ Night / Christchurch (New Zealand), End of the Alphabet Records, 2017, audiocassette.
Fig. 4 – Yan Jun, score of Seeds Dialogue, page 3 of 12, March 2010.
Fig. 5 – Yan Jun, How to Eat Sunflower Seeds, August 2011, Beijing, Today Art Museum. Photo by Yan Jun.
Fig. 6 – Samson Young, Sonata for Smoke, 2021 (revised), video with stereo sound, 15 minutes 49 seconds, pastel on recycled paper, pastel on acrylic, pastel on air-dry clay. Courtesy of the artist. Photo: Dennis Man Wing Leung.
Fig. 7 – Pan Daijing, In Service of a Song, 2017. Installation views, House of World Cultures, Berlin.