Results and Outcomes

When reflecting on this project, it is also necessary to be aware of what was happening in the field of sound art in the West. From the twentieth century to the present, we have witnessed many outstanding Western sound artists, as well as many excellent voice-, language-, and rhythm-related sound works, from Samuel Beckett’s Krapp’s Last Tape (1958) to Alvin Lucier’s I Am Sitting in a Room (1969) to Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller’s Forty Part Motet (2001) and to Meredith Monk’s Dancing Voice (2017). Each explores the boundaries of voice, the auditory perception of rhythm, and the deep relationships between sound and space.

Let us take Cardiff and Miller’s Forty Part Motet (2001) as an example, which is a sound installation consisting of forty speakers defining a space inhabited by a choral work by English Renaissance composer Thomas Tallis, Spem in Alium (1573), itself written for 40 voices. Arranged in an oval and in sound clusters, one can move between the speakers/voices or remain still amid the intersecting harmonies, resonances, individual voices, and distinct textual lines. It is indeed a ‘sonic choreography’ of the space. Indeed, Cardiff and Miller deal with the acoustic atmosphere of the sonic space they create. What I am doing in this project definitely shares some similarities, but the working process and the ultimate goal are very different. My goal is to create a kind of visual representation of rhythmic patterns, and the visualization of sonic rhythm itself is achieved through the contemporary recreation of traditional visual artistic forms. Meanwhile, as a vocal performance investigating the formal repetition of rhymes within individual poetic patterns, with a constant repetition of rhymes and an almost unrecognizable voice in the later stages of the piece, Hearing Rhythm, Seeing Rhythm: The Sad Zither is indeed influenced by Alvin Lucier’s I Am Sitting in a Room (1969). Yet, in this project, the context of the research is different, as is the purpose of it. In the research, I experiment with traditional Chinese rhythmic rules, explore their visualization possibilities, and then investigate the relationship between sound and visuals through an integrated sonic–visual space, in order to explore the feasibility of establishing a contemporary Chinese art with my artistic methodologies.

This ultimate goal is shared by many other Chinese artists as well. An artist-designer team from Zhejiang University created an award-winning multi-sensory visualization project, 典章和韵 林壑蔚然: The Repetition Structure of the Book of Songs and the Visualization of Phonic Rhythm, an artistic visualization project that works with the rhythmic repetition structure (复沓结构) of traditional Chinese poetry in the Book of Songs.1 The project visualizes the repetitive rhythms of the songs and poems in the book and creates music based on the rhythmic notes with traditional Chinese instruments, investigating the intricate relationship between sound and imagery, as well as the profound relationship between tradition and the contemporary. Li Jianhong is a contemporary Chinese musician who works deeply with the methodology of traditional artistic aesthetics. His environmental sound improvisational work Twelve Moods (十二境) presents the difference between this attempt and contemporary Western music and sound-making, as well as its internal and profound connections with ancient acoustic and musical expressions. Therefore, the sound, imagery, and multi-sensory, multimedia, and interactive artistic practices of contemporary Chinese artists, including myself, can be understood as various attempts to reclaim the tradition of pre-modern Chinese art and culture. It is precisely these attempts that are building, bit by bit, a Chinese contemporary art that comes from indigenous Chinese culture itself.

For both exhibitions, I received feedback from a questionnaire I handed out. The feedback offered the experience of the work from the audience’s view point. (A detailed examination of the questionnaire results is given in the Appendix.) This work, Hearing Rhythm, Seeing Rhythm, has been exhibited in both China and Ireland. With both the Chinese audience, the native speakers, who understood the language and grew up with these poems/lyrics, and with the Irish/international audience (the non-Chinese speakers), who did not understand the language or the original poems, the two exhibitions tested theories of reclaiming traditional culture via the use of the rules of rhythm as principles and patterns solely in sound (disregarding the specific content), as well as the relationship between sound and visuals within the context of Chinese lyric aesthetics, combined with methodologies (including sound installation works) dealing with the repetitions and breakdowns of verbal rhymes performed as visual transcriptions of the singing process joined with Chinese painting.

With the feedback from the questionnaire, I learned that both native Chinese speakers and non-Chinese speakers managed to focus on the sound and recognize the breakdown of rhythm, regardless of the content. For the non-Chinese-speaking viewers, the rhythm was very clearly identified in the listening process and the connection between the sound space and the visual wall was widely understood. The Chinese audience brought a fascinating and imaginative ‘reading’ of a sonic–visual world related to tradition and history and even expressed a kind of ‘mind-roaming’ inside Chinese painting. The different designs of the sound and visual spaces caused varied reactions from the audience. The space that separated the visual and sound components offered a much more dissociated sensorial experience, urging viewers to merge two forms of sensory experience. Meanwhile, the integrated sonic–visual space was a more immersive physical space, combined with voice and imagery, which offered the visitors an integrated sensorial experience. In other words, the two contemporary artistic experiments dealing with the relationship between sound and imagery demonstrated that, in accordance with my attempt in this project, the integrated sonic–visual art form can offer a stronger presentation in investigating the rules of rhythm in the specific context of the Chinese aesthetic experience.

Finally, it is important to acknowledge that in the historical time frame, Eastern rhythmic rules developed in parallel with Western poetic and musical rhythmic schemes and forms of notation. Eastern forms are distinct compared to Western systems and are the sole theoretical foundation of this research. Yet, I also need to clarify that even though the rules of rhythm have evolved over thousands of years of China’s long history, the historical and theoretical contexts of this project have many layers, since it stands as an artistic practice-based project and is not about the research, per se. Rather, it is about assimilating rules and expanding the research to create an experimental framework for the practice. This project necessitates a kind of contextualization of theory and historical facts, but it is a practice I use as a methodology for reclaiming and visualizing traditional rhythmic rules. I work within and also break the layers of the rules or regulations I found in my historical and theoretical research in order to gain a deeper and more complete understanding of pre-modern Chinese culture, and in this way I reimagine contemporary Chinese art in the context of Chinese aesthetics.

At the same time, this work also reaches out to younger audiences outside Chinese cultural circles. Though I use Chinese history and the Chinese language as a case study, it relates to other cultures struggling with cultural reclamation as well. It considers a specific kind of loss of indigenous history, culture, and language, one that has occurred in Ireland, Africa, South America, and all cultures surviving forms of linguistic colonialism. I think this is what I can offer as an artist in this time of dramatic reevaluation of cultural identity.