te issue 2: Song of the Nightingale 夜莺之歌
18.5 x 26cm
150p
Chinese & English
Hectograph, thread-bound
ISBN 978-1-957144-70-2
First published in 2023
Contributors: Moe Satt, Mi Chan Wai, Chung Yung-Feng, Hsia Hsiao-Chuan, Hu Wei, Jonathas de Andrade, Laurel V. McLaughlin, Musquiqui Chihying, Ha Guangtian, Tyingknots, Xenia Benivolski, Sturla Brandth Grøvlen
Designer: Can Yang
PRESS:
Stack
Art Review 艺术世界
Asymmetry
USD$40
The expression “speak out” in Chinese is fā shēng, which literally means “to produce sound”. It often has a vital social component, but at the same time emphasizes an immediate choice and agency. While Michel Chion interprets sound as a cognitive act, “to produce sound” is more of a concrete social practice, one that creates a spark. te’s second issue takes inspiration from recent events and debates reverberating all around us, and the 10 pieces in this issue investigate the transformative points of contact where sound, language and action intersect. Together, the contributors discuss this abstract and ubiquitous medium, creating an album of diverse and dialogical tracks. The appeal of sound lies in its improvisation, but it remains mysterious due to the various roles that it has played historically and in modern society, as well as its absence of physical form. How can we use words to describe sound? How does sound operate in different contexts? What does it mean to speak out? How does sound become a form of individual expression and what are its possibilities and limits? There are no correct answers to these questions, and finding an answer may no longer be relevant at this point. But this issue may offer some ways to navigate our current dilemmas. In Xenia Benivolski’s contribution to the issue, she considers British radio broadcasts during the Second World War. When the nightingale songbirds and cellist Beatrice Harrison’s ensemble played, this music composed between nature and humanity was so magical that the BBC used it to soothe the minds of listeners in the midst of war. And what’s more, nightingales have two distinct traits: they migrate with the seasons and they sing out in the dark.
Myanmar artist Moe Satt and poet Mi Chan Wai, through an essay and a poem, recall several detailed moments when sounds were woven together during the Spring Revolution in 2021. The streets were flooded not only with the sounds of slogans, beating pots and pans, and the noise of never-ending car horns, but also the invisible sound of silence. The sounds of the resistance have also transformed into collective memory. Our focus then turned to Taiwan in the 1990s, when a cohort of college graduates chose to leave Taipei for their rural hometowns and joined the growing social movements originating in Meinung, in particular the Anti-Reservoir Movement and the New Immigrant Women’s Movement. The Labor Exchange Band, born out of the former movement, was rooted in and committed to the local community, creating music out of materials collected from the scenes and soundscapes of rural life, and inspiring continued grassroots support for the campaign. The new immigrant movement shed light on the lives of Southeast Asian women who married into Hakka villages. The “Chinese Literacy Program for Foreign Brides” helped immigrant women overcome the language barrier and empowered them to challenge the social discriminationthat structurally disadvantaged them. With two decades’ hindsight, te speaks with the Labor Exchange Band’s co-founder Chung Yung-Feng and the founder of the Chinese Literacy campaign Hsia Hsiao-Chuan on the symbiosis of theory and practice in social activism. How do we avoid slipping into grand heroic narratives, and whose voices should we amplify with the microphone of history? Digging deeper down into the sediments of history, we find points of connection between mythologies formulated outside the dominant strands of narrative and the experience of the sea-bound diaspora: a slave ship caught in the ocean’s fury, the stateless Bajau people making a life on the sea off the Malay Archipelago, shipwrecks left behind and communities banished… Visual artist Hu Wei tries to piece together the genealogy of a fictional species, using clues from the history of electronic music and the evolution of human hearing, re-assembling a map of lost and dispersed identities. Brazilian artist Jonathas de Andrade discovered, during his field trips to a village in Sertão, that local hearing-impaired groups developed a unique sign language system. Unlike the standard sign language system taught and used in other parts of the country, the Sertão version incorporates movements and facial expressions that are much more dramatic and, to the unaccustomed eye, almost performative. For Jonathas, this local sign language more than satisfies the communicative function and achieves a type of re-enactment of past events. It inspired the idea for his film Jogos Dirigidos (Directed Games). In this issue, de Andrade and two linguists who conducted studies in the same village have a trans-disciplinary conversation about the artistic and expressive power of the Sertão sign language system.
Art historian Laurel V. McLaughlin chose as her subject the life and work of the Korean American performance artist and poet Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, who fused her experience as an immigrant with her mystical performance art. Withoutmuch existing visual record of Cha’s art, so McLaughlin carefully reconstructs the scenes, choreography and manners of contact with viewers Cha chose and invented for her work. In doing so, sheweaves Cha’s family and immigration stories into a collage of fragments, aiming for a shamanistic state of inter-connection. Artist Musquiqui Chihying reconsiders three “moments” in the long history of colonialism, moments that to varying degrees represent three types of “sound”. Marginalized history, in one instance, is thoughtfully teased out through the close reading of a museum piece, and, in another, takes shape against an amalgam of background sounds. “Can a museum piece produce its own sound?” Often in play behind such questions are a wide range of interests, ideological and material, while the intrinsic meaning of the piece becomes quietly obscured. Together with the public anthropology forum Tyingknots, we interviewed scholar Ha Guangtian about his research and writing on the little-known Chinese Sufi Muslim order, the Jahriyya. Devotees to this order are known for their loud chanting. When performing the ritual of reading the holy text out loud in a religious space, individuals follow the different chanting conventions and techniques passed down by their teachers, and the result is a roiling ocean surface of sounds. The interview discusses the ideas about and practices behind Sufi Muslim chanting, and reveals a fuller picture of the unique spiritual and cultural traditions alive in this community. Sound can be exploited, even abused. Russian Tatar curator Xenia Benivolski discusses how, since the beginning of the 20th century, sound has acquired more and more attributes through advances in technology, which have allowed for its manipulation by humans to serve their private ends. People have manipulated sound to obtain power, and to steer the opinions and feelings of others. From the songs of nightingales during the Second World War to the “Ghost Tape” recordings used in the Vietnam War, the new, technology-informed production and dissemination of sound came to be shaped by human desires and rapaciousness. In the short interval of peace after World War II, the former Republic of Yugoslavia erected hundreds of variously shaped memorial sculptures. They were meant to embody people’s opposition to war and their commitment to tolerance and peaceful co-existence, but today the meaning of these sculptures is being forgotten, and they’ve turned into sites of sharp disputes. Composer Jóhann Jóhannsson and cinematographer Sturla Brandth Grøvlen traversed the land to make the film Last and First Men, giving the sculptures a new language composed of Jóhannsson’s sound work, Grøvlen’s moving images and Tilda Swinton’s vocal narration. Assuming the perspective of a human race on the verge of extinction two billion years in the future, the film looks back at the entire human history and sends out the message: we are living the past, but also the future.