In conjunction with the exhibition Inside China – L’Intérieur du Géant, the evening brings together three overlapping movements of sound and image, from China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan. Constructed narratives crossover to urgent dreams of fractured modernity, with the flow of Facebook images against the sound of crashing waves.
ONE
Since his first video work, Light Source (2005), in which the grainy image of a door is split by a beam of light radiating through its slow opening, Cheng Ran (b. 1981, lives and works in Hangzhou and Amsterdam) has restlessly plumbed the physicality of the moving image, ranging from cellphone camera to Super 8 to HD, as an ongoing engagement with the way his generation desires and consumes sound and image. The evening presents a selection of his videos from the past 10 years.
TWO
Like many people, Hong Kong artist Lai Lon Hin (b. 1982, lives and works in Hong Kong) takes photos on his mobile phone and posts them immediately on his Facebook page. What sets his images apart is that in the extreme cropping, his subjects seem trapped in the urban environment yet somehow liberated from the humdrum of the everyday, questioning what is real in pushing the limits of the camera phone as a witness to contemporary lives. Recently, the artist has abruptly suspended these records of the everyday, in which art gives way to political urgency. Lai Lon Hin presents a slideshow composed of 365 days of his Facebook posts.
THREE
Sounds of waves crashing on the shore in Ji’an Township in Hualien, Taiwan, were recorded on the album Lang laile: Qingting, Taiwan de hua (waves are coming: listen carefully, Taiwan is speaking) by Kun-ming Fu, who was an important technician involved in recording Taiwanese indigenous songs, in 1997. The record, among many that were perhaps too experimental and idealistic, bankrupted Crystal Records due to the lack of sales. Brimmed with political implication, the record serves as a key to the exhibition “Altering Nativism ─ Sound Cultures in Post-War Taiwan”, curated by Ho Tung-hung, Jeph Lo, and Amy Cheng of the non-profit TheCube Project Space (Taipei), which toured to Museum of National Taipei University of Education, Taipei and Kaohsiung Museum of Fine Arts, Kaohsiung, Taiwan, in 2014.
With Meryll Ampe.