Fri. 01.11.19 / 6 pm This is no country music
Performance Lecture by Hong-Kai Wang
Artspeak
Hong-Kai Wang, This is no country music. Performance documentation by Sungpil Yoon.
Hong-Kai Wang, This is no country music. Performance documentation by Sungpil Yoon.
Hong-Kai Wang, This is no country music. Performance documentation by Sungpil Yoon.
Hong-Kai Wang, This is no country music. Performance documentation by Sungpil Yoon.
Hong-Kai Wang, This is no country music. Performance documentation by Sungpil Yoon.
Hong-Kai Wang, This is no country music. Performance documentation by Sungpil Yoon.
Hong-Kai Wang, Quivering. Exhibition documentation by Dennis Ha.
Hong-Kai Wang, Quivering. Exhibition documentation by Dennis Ha.
Hong-Kai Wang, Quivering. Exhibition documentation by Dennis Ha.
Hong-Kai Wang, Quivering. Exhibition documentation by Dennis Ha.
This is no country music took the form of a performative lecture/collective listening session, around the work of Taiwanese vocalist and composer Koh Bunya, particularly his Earthquake Relief Song. Born in 1910, Bunya’s practice developed between China and Japan. Having been born in Taiwan under Japanese colonial rule, and living in China as the People’s Republic of China was founded, Bunya’s work has come to embody the complexity of the deeply entangled history of this region. This is no country music grapples with lines of query around statelessness, borders, bodies, and lived experience. Wang’s methodological approach engages voice, vibration, and practices of listening combined with geological histories of natural disasters. Geological time offers a depth that requires a different comprehension of time, towards an immediate binary of human/non-human co-existence.
This project was commissioned by the Asian Art Biennial and Tokyo Theatre Commons. The first iteration of This is no country music was presented at Theatre Commons Tokyo (March 2019). An iteration of this project is also included as part of the Asian Art Biennial: The Strangers from beyond the Mountain and the Sea, Taichung City, Taiwan (2019).
As an artist-in-residence at Artspeak, Wang continues to build upon her research, developing methodologies that will take into consideration our location on the unceded territories of the Squamish, Musqueam, and Tsleil-Waututh, and this region being situated on the Cascadia Subduction Zone, Pacific Ring of Fire.
Special thanks to: Nadya Isabella, Julia Dahee Hong, Aubin Kwon, Gabi Dao, Sungpil Yoon, and Dennis Ha.
Venue
Artspeak
233 Carrall Street
Bios
Hong-Kai Wang is an artist based in Taipei, Taiwan. Her research based practice confronts the politics of knowledge lost in colonial and diasporic encounters. Through experimental modes of sonic sociality, her multidisciplinary work seeks to conceive of other time-spaces at the intersection of lived experience, power and ‘listening’. Wang’s work critically interweaves the production of desire, histories of labor and economies of cohabitation. She has presented projects at Asia Art Biennial 2019; Theater Commons Tokyo 2019; Sculpture Center New York; documenta 14; Taipei Biennial 2016; Liquid Architecture; and the Museum of Modern Art.
Tobias Ewé is a Danish experimental theorist currently based in Vancouver, BC. He is writing a PhD on inhuman psychoacoustics in the Department of Art History at the University of British Columbia. His research focuses on the epistemology of listening in modernity, and its symptoms in the sonic arts at the nexus between vibrational inhumanism and speculative aesthetics. His most recent work appears in Holger Schulze, ed (2019), Handbook of the Anthropology of Sound, London: Bloomsbury; and Laboria Cuboniks (2018[2015]), Xenofeminisme: En politik for fremmedgørelse, trans. Tobias Ewé, Copenhagen: Passive/Aggressive. Tobias has exhibited/performed diagrams and sonic fictions in Germany, Canada, Denmark, Italy and online.
Accessibility
Front door width is 58 inches with a 6 inch step, wheelchair ramp accessible by request. Staff can assist.
Washroom door width is 36 inches.
