Sound · Moving · Memory
Artwork
Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your ears!
Number, Language & Sound
Moving Image,
06’05’’,
Size variable,
2021
From the past to the present, number, language, and sound always have been playing important roles in our life. It is invisible and powerful. They are intertwined, dependent on each other, playing wonderful music of communication.
However, due to my hearing problems since childhood, I would pay more attention to the sound that I heard every minute. To me, it is not only an irreversible regret but also a nontypical life. During these years, I made a lot of effort to learn languages and tried to speak like normal. However, a subtle gap always exists. I cannot separate some numbers according to their pronunciation in a similar way in Chinese. Meanwhile, there are also words with similar pronunciations in English.
In daily life, sound is invisible and esoteric. The only way to get accurate numbers of sound is to measure them with instruments. Numbers and language are semi-visible to us. They act as invisible clues in people's daily conversations, in books, and in all kinds of social situations.
I use my camera to record subtle movements, edit into six minutes of video. Just breathe and feel it.
Am I...I am?
Moving Image,
Size Vairable,
2024
What is sound?
I have carried this question for years, yet I have never been able to define it with certainty. To me, sound has never existed as something stable or fully graspable. It arrives through fragments, delays, distortions, and absences — constantly shifting between presence and disappearance.
My relationship with sound shapes the way I experience time, space, and communication. I often encounter the world through interruption: incomplete conversations, uncertain directions, distant vibrations, and gaps between sound and recognition. Listening becomes an act of reconstruction rather than immediate understanding.
Since experiencing sudden hearing loss in 2023, these conditions have become increasingly central to my practice. The experience intensified my awareness of absence, delay, and instability in listening, reshaping the way I perceive sound and spatial orientation. I began to approach sound not only as an auditory phenomenon, but as a psychological and spatial condition capable of producing distance, disorientation, memory, and estrangement. Recording, layering, repetition, and fragmentation allow me to examine how listening is continuously mediated, translated, and negotiated.
Through moving image, sound, installation, and visual translation, I construct environments shaped by unstable forms of listening. Rather than pursuing a fixed or socially accepted idea of “normal” sound, I am interested in moments where perception begins to fracture and transform into something unfamiliar.
My work does not attempt to resolve these uncertainties. Instead, it remains within them.
A Broken Voice
Moving Image,
Size Variable,
2024
Voice is woven through language, becoming sound through rhythm, breath, and articulation. Yet I continue to question whether sound can ever be fully grasped. If it is delayed, isolated, or separated from time and context, does it still retain its meaning, or does it become something else entirely?
I was never formally trained in lip reading, yet it gradually became embedded in the way I communicate, especially within bilingual environments and during periods in which sound became increasingly inaccessible. Words began to unfold visually: meaning shifted into movements, fragments, and the continuous formation of lips.
For me, listening is inseparable from vision. Sound is often anticipated through visual signals before it is recognised as audible, much like seeing lightning before hearing thunder. This inversion of sensory order reshapes my perception of time, space, and presence. Listening no longer exists as a purely auditory act, but as something mediated through image, delay, and expectation which is a form of “presence in presence,” as Jean-Luc Nancy describes in Listening.
I think of sound as something fluid and unstable, existing somewhere between material presence and disappearance. It moves like water, difficult to hold, yet capable of carrying memory, emotion, and sensation across space.
Through fragmented voices, interrupted rhythms, and acts of visual translation, I continue searching for ways to speak within these unstable conditions of listening. Even when perception breaks apart, the fragments remain capable of forming their own continuity.
Red Veil
Moving Image,
Size Variable,
2025
Red Veil is an experimental dance film that merges contemporary movement with Eastern visual language to explore the tension between self-awareness and collective identity.
Centered around the motif of the red veil, the work traces a psychological and bodily transformation: a figure moves from lucidity into entanglement, gradually caught within layers of fabric, gesture, and gaze. What begins as an act of awakening slowly becomes an encounter with invisible structures of belonging, pressure, and repetition.
In the process of attempting release, the body discovers that what seemed external has already been internalised, the red is no longer an object worn or removed, but something absorbed into perception itself.
The film unfolds as a visual meditation on identity formation, social imprinting, and the persistence of internalised symbols. It sits between choreography and cinema, observing how movement becomes both resistance and inscription.
This is a group work and DOP/ Videographer/ Photographer is Xiaohan Luo.
No Traveller Returns
Moving Image,
Size Variable,
2026
Time passes, but perception does not move with it evenly.
Consciousness drifts, stretches, hesitates. What repeats is never the same. Distance becomes hollow, bodies pass by, and only sound — fragile, brief — strikes the mind like a match, leaving afterimages rather than memories.
Sound resists definition. The more I approach it, the more unstable it becomes. Images do not clarify sound; instead, they blur under its pressure. They intertwine, overlap, and remain unresolved. In my world, sound and image exist as parallel forces — never reconciled, only held in tension.
I experience sound through my body before I understand it.
There is no stable ground from which to listen. I move, I turn, I pause, and sound follows unevenly, sometimes arriving too late, sometimes too early, sometimes not at all. What remains is not meaning, but a sustained state of alertness.
No sound waits for me. It passes through, indifferent. I am left with the task of enduring it — of resisting the void it opens. I am not a listener in the conventional sense, but a surface upon which sound leaves traces.
Sound is not something I possess.
It is something I confront.
Shī Shì Shí Shī Shǐ
Print on paper,
A2,
2026
This work originates from Lion-Eating Poet in the Stone Den, a homophonic text by Chinese linguist Yuen Ren Chao, first published in 1916 in The Chinese Students’ Monthly.
Written entirely through characters that converge toward the same pronunciation in Mandarin, the text constructs an apparently coherent narrative that dissolves into repetition. What appears to be a story is, in fact, a linguistic system built on sound rather than semantic clarity.
Through this radical phonetic constraint, the work exposes the instability between meaning and sound in the Chinese language, where tone becomes both structure and disruption.
In this project, the text is re-translated into sound and printed matter, shifting language from a system of reading into a field of listening. Meaning is no longer fixed but continually displaced through repetition, rhythm, and sonic proximity.
The work also emerges from a personal auditory condition: an inability to clearly distinguish between the sounds “s” and “sh”. This perceptual ambiguity resonates with the structure of the poem itself, where differentiation collapses into continuity.
If Clouds Know
Photography,
Photolithography,
60cm x 20cm,
2023
Emotions Stirred
Memories Aroused
Time Condensed
As I grow older, I realize increasingly that there is no such thing as a constant companion. People come and go, leaving traces and memories that are just simply words. So, I began to look at the clouds that are present and company all the time. For me, their forms are new and old every day. They weave in and out of my stories, shadowless and yet carrying my catharsis, troubles, and joys.
Photography is an important medium through which I view the world. Through the quick and narrow eye of the camera, I give clouds a personal response in different emotional and spatial contexts, placing them in the same image. In each spot of the work, the cloud tells a hidden story of my encounter, reunion, and goodbye to it.
I love it, but it doesn't always know.
This series contains works from 2023-2025
M·E
Printed on films,
14.8cm x 21cm x 2,
2021
Self-identity is my main topic.
As I am slowly stepping into society, I feel the transformation of different identities. I am no longer just a child at home, I am a wanderer who travels far to study. The surrounding environment is unfamiliar to me, and interpersonal relationships have become so complicated.
I can't help but have a lot of doubts and physical discomforts. What am I doing, and what kind of person will I become? Therefore, I began to search for my identity and beliefs.
Ruins
Installation,
Size variable,
2021
Growing up is not only the growth of memory, but also the dissipation of memory.
Everyone’s perception of things is not the same. We once experience something together but what remains in our memory in the end is different. Although we communicate with each other, there will be gaps exist that both sides cannot fill. That is my ruin, an invisible place in my heart.
I want to build a ruin to memorize things I have experienced and make an imagination of city development.
This work attempts to rediscover the past, the present and the so-called useless but it is a matter of great significance to oneself in the ruins.
Light, Light, Light
Sculptures,
Radius: 11.2 cm x12,
Plaster, billiards,
2021
In the city where I live, there are a group of blind people who support themselves by running massage parlors. Through several contacts with them, I gradually became familiar with and understood these people. I began to pay attention to them unconsciously, observing the barrier-free measures in my life.
I saw the braille guidelines in the library, the dots and rectangles on the blind roads, and the blind people who live in a variety of blind massage parlors. I came back to think of myself, and of us who like us in this world. Because of the lack of one sense, our other senses will be enlarged and more sensitive. Feelings are unspeakable. Therefore, from the perspective of people, let us remember, feel, and touch together once again, this innate and irreplaceable feeling.
Dissociation
Installation,
Clothes,
Size variable，
2021
I live in a rainy city. When it rains, I am used to holding an umbrella, which can isolate me from the crowd like an invisible barrier.
Hence, I am used to observing other people‘s world under the umbrella. Rain is really a magician, they separate when they fall but they will eventually meet. It is like the individuals in the crowd are independent but have multiple forms of connections. I walk outside with a dissociative gesture, and my body is the ultimate home of my soul.
Measure
Mixed Media,
Acrylic,
Size Variables,
2024
How could I measure a sound?
I do not think of sound as something fixed or purely audible. I experience it as movement, vibration, atmosphere, and visual tension — something that drifts between sensation and imagination. In this work, I try to approach sound through colour, rhythm, and spatial composition, translating it into forms that can be felt visually rather than heard directly.
Unlike my earlier ink-based works, this series turns towards colour as a way of constructing sensory intensity. I use layered tones, shifting textures, and fragmented visual structures to create unstable emotional and spatial frequencies. Colour becomes a form of resonance: a way for me to trace the presence of sound through abstraction, repetition, and accumulation.
While working on these pieces, I became increasingly interested in the moment where perception begins to blur — where memory, sensation, and imagined sound overlap. Rather than representing sound itself, I want to construct an environment that allows its instability and afterimage to emerge.
Through this process, I attempt to build a space where sound can exist beyond the limits of hearing, suspended between absence and presence.
Directionless
Sound Pieces,
Series,
2024
I often struggle to locate the direction of sound, especially when voices arrive from uncertain or obscured positions. Conversations dissolve into fragments; distance and orientation become unstable. This disorientation has led me to think about sound not as a fixed point of origin, but as something shifting, unreliable, and psychologically charged.
In this work, I explore the tension between recognition and uncertainty through field recordings, layered audio, and spatial composition. I collect sounds from different locations and reconstruct them into multi-tracked environments that reflect fragmented and unstable forms of listening. Rather than pursuing sonic clarity or technical precision, I intentionally preserve distortion, interference, background noise, and uneven textures within the recordings.
Most recordings are captured casually through my phone, allowing accidental sounds, interruptions, and spatial inconsistencies to remain present. Through editing and layering, I construct immersive surround-like sound environments in which direction, proximity, and presence become difficult to determine.
The work considers how sound can generate both intimacy and disorientation, how listening can simultaneously produce connection, distance, mistrust, and psychological tension.