Specialising and Exhibiting

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Week8-Sound Arts Lecture Series

Hong-Kai Wang is an interdisciplinary artist, researcher and educator based in Taipei. She is currently a PhD in Practice candidate at Academy of Fine Arts Vienna.  

Wang’s research-based practice confronts the politics of knowledge lost in colonial and diasporic encounters at the intersection of lived experience, power, and “listening.” Through experimental modes of sonic sociality, her multidisciplinary work seeks to conceive of other time spaces that critically interweave the production of desire, histories of labor, economies of co-habitation, and formations of knowledge. n addition, she has conducted pedagogical projects at the KUNCI Cultural Studies Forum & Collective (Yogyakarta), Swedish Royal Institute of Art (Stockholm), Oslo National Academy of the Arts (Oslo), Ale School of Fine Arts and Design (Addis Ababa), York University (Toronto), the University of Applied Arts Vienna (Vienna), Dutch Art Institute (Amsterdam), the alternative art education program Spring Sessions (Amman and Sinai), etc.

I am a bit annoyed when she has not shown anything which could be listened to when she turns up. I have no interest in listening to her reading her artwork and I am also quite busy and panic with my own handings.

Then I am looking at her work “anti-monuments” which is related to Chinese religion. “Listening In” is a column dedicated to sound, music, and listening practices in contemporary art and its spaces. This section focuses on how listening practices are being investigated and reconfigured by artists working across disciplines in the twenty-first century.

Melodies lost to the violence of empire. Vanished monuments marking anti-colonial choruses. Hidden, transgressive dances of migrant domestic workers. Inaudible and obscured, these sounds and movements haunt Hong-Kai Wang’s work. Rather than erecting monuments to these pasts, Wang uses listening, sounding, and singing as conduits to these lost or absent acts across temporal and geopolitical distances. This practice, situated around sound both real and imagined, might be described as anti-monumental.

I feel quite dead when listening to the piece. The voices were being compressed into a very low frequency which I am very annoyed by. I quite like the last talking part when old people start to communicate with each other than listening to their dead singing. It is fitting a topic but it just bothers me a lot.