@ Ve.Sch, Vienna
歌聲裡徘徊 Linger in Sounds
A lecture and sound performance in collaboration with Ye Hui
2023
Linger in Sounds is a lecture and sound performance, a blend of autobiographical utterances that looks into old TV commercials, and music videos in the 80s and 90s in China. It is an assemblage of singing, murmuring, and dialogues. In it, audio, visual, and emotional patterns within historical as well as contemporary sound and visual archives are explored. Singing voices extracted from old pop songs open a soundscape that transmits multiple messages and re-composes histories. Among the polyphonic clamor of the past and its echoes in the present, the performance reflects on collective amnesia in the age of economic reform and its entangled relationship with singing.
Led by Qu Chang and Ye Hui, Linger in Sounds is the first public presentation derived from the two’s long-term artistic research focusing on popular music in Mainland China from the 80s onwards. Their research seeks to re-listen and re-feel pop music as an important medium embedded in the structure of feeling in post-reform China. They see the act of singing as an effective and lyrical exercise of subject-making. And through different artistic expressions, they delineate the ways in which songs and singing embed in us and become us.