‘Parts’ of China
2017, Sound Installation
The sound installation explores themes of cultural fragmentation and dispersal through the symbolic act of breaking porcelain, specifically examining the historical distribution of Ming and Qing dynasty imperial artifacts across three Palace Museums in mainland China, Taiwan, and Hong Kong.
The work's core element is a sound recording of breaking porcelain - specifically, a piece of China. This singular sound is deconstructed into seven distinct fragments through frequency isolation:
1. 0-0.2 kHz (very low frequencies)
2. 0.2-4 kHz
3. 4-5 kHz
4. 5-7 kHz
5. 7-10 kHz
6. 10-12 kHz
7. 12-22 kHz (ultrahigh frequencies)
These fragmented sounds are reanimated through separate devices, each playing short, looping segments. The tracks occasionally overlap, creating an emergent, aleatory composition. Each device and its corresponding sound becomes a point of contemplation - a sonic metaphor for territorial divisions and cultural reimagining.
Each isolated frequency range is assigned to a separate
playback device, creating a distributed sound environment. The fragments
play in continuous loops, with their temporal overlaps generating
spontaneous harmonic and dissonant interactions.
Multichannel sound installation,
7 tracks of sound, loop
Audio Documentation Excerpt of the work: here
Exhibition views: Zaal 3, Den Haag, in The Netherlands.
The frequency spectrum of the breaking porcelain sound is divided into these seven ranges.