A Hatched Dream: Insight Guides
“A Hatched Dream: Insight Guides” is based on the preliminary research conducted for the 2023 exhibition A Hatched Dream. The exhibition, on view at Absolute Space for the Arts, featured Cambodia-based artists and artists who have experience in Eurasian travel. The artists and curators also visited routes or regions highlighted in global discourses in recent years due to geopolitics and authoritarianism. In addition to conducting field research, they also recorded sounds in the places they visited. Based on the topics and regions explored in this exhibition, this program series showcases researchers and sound artists in related fields, along with conversations and sound creations extended therefrom.
This project is subsidized by the National Culture and Arts Foundation and the Department of Cultural Affairs, Taipei City Government.
Curating｜TSAI Ping-Ju, LI Kuei-Pi
Audio Engineer｜T.Rex Music Studio
Sound Designer｜Bai-Shiang Music Studio
Translator｜David CHUANG, Alex HUANG, CHIANG Yu-Ting
Special Thanks｜SHIH Chien-Yu, Soko PHAY, CHEN Chun-Yu
EP1| China: The Expansion of an Emerging Empire in Asia
SHIH Chien-Yu
SHIH Chien-Yu currently serves as an Associate Research Fellow at Taiwan Institute for National Defense and Security Research (INDSR). He has taught courses on Politics and International Relations at Taiwan National Tsinghua University, University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong Chinese University, and Hong Kong Chuhai College. His research focuses mainly on China’s ethnic politics and Xinjiang governance, China’s international relations with Central Asia, with particular reference to Uyghur nationalism and Islamism.
About the program
“A Hatched Dream: Insight Guides” is based on the preliminary research conducted for the 2023 exhibition A Hatched Dream. The exhibition, on view at Absolute Space for the Arts, featured Cambodia-based artists and artists who have experience in Eurasian travel. The artists and curators also visited routes or regions highlighted in global discourses in recent years due to geopolitics and authoritarianism. In addition to conducting field research, they also recorded sounds in the places they visited. Based on the topics and regions explored in this exhibition, this program series showcases researchers and sound artists in related fields, along with conversations and sound creations extended therefrom.
The guest featured in this episode, SHIH Chien-Yu, begins with the research about China’s Belt and Road Initiative and the Central Asian culture. He explores the crisscrossing routes in A Hatched Dream and complicated political and historical elements underlying these routes, initiating a discussion about the new international relations stemming the Belt and Road Initiative, the “run” movement, the resilience of Taiwan’s democracy, and global industrial chains.
EP2| Hundred Years of Traveling (feat. HUNG Tzu Ni)
“Space to sound,
sound to body,
body to machine,
machine to poetry,
poetry to space.”
HUNG Tzu Ni
Tzu Ni is an installation/sound artist based in Taiwan. Her work primarily utilises spatial and sonic installations as her practices; as to (de)construct the interconnected relationship between sound, gender and space. Recently her work has revolved around feminine bodies and how it whisper during decay, through sound installations that incorporate text & stories from subconscious and field recording material through natural belongings.
She believes in the flexibility of human bodies and views the intersection of technology and humanity as a sweet spot, seeks the balance between institutional and non- institutional contexts.
In a social landscape filled to the brim with busy work, she whispers to create an environment where a listener or viewer might enter into a interstice, momentarily isolated from the outer world, and be able to more intensely perceive one’s frame of mind & body.
About the program
In Hundred Years of Traveling, artist HUNG Tzu-Ni continues her previous method of sound creation to address intersecting points between the “past” and the “present” on the Silk Road, considering how “speed” can be perceived through hearing using symbolic sounds from different time periods. The episode includes a twenty-minute sound piece created using the recordings made in Xinjiang by CHEN Jun-Yu, an artist in A Hatched Dream, and the sounds recorded by the exhibition’s curator, TSAI Ping-Ju, in India. The artist simulates a walk spanning centuries. To Hung, under the influence of environmental changes and limited productivity of the pre-industrial eras, people have perceived the speed of passing time differently. In this work, speed is not only highlighted in the arrangement of sounds but also in the duration of the piece.
EP3-1｜Postmemory: The Cambodian Genocide and Generational Traumas (French Version)
EP3-2｜Postmemory: The Cambodian Genocide and Generational Traumas (Mandarin Version)
Soko PHAY
Soko PHAY is full professor in art history and theory at Université Paris 8. She head the EA 4010 Lab “Arts des images et art contemporain”. Since her p.h.d in 1999 at the University of Paris 8 (« Le miroir comme emblème de la peinture, ses figurations et transfigurations, de Vermeer à Richter »), she has continued to devote her research to the aesthetic of the mirror in art. She has also curated several exhibitions (« Beyond Narcissus », 2005, Dorky Gallery, New York) and has edited multi-author volumes (Le miroir dans l’art de Manet à Richter, 2001), which earned her the art critic scholarship from the French Ministry of Culture (Les vertiges du miroir dans l’art contemporain, 2016). In the same time she is conducting her research on the links between art, history and mass crimes. Co-ed. of Cambodia, the Memory-Workshop (Sonleuk Thmey, 2010), Cambodge, le génocide effacé (with Pierre Bayard, Cecile Defaut, 2013), Figurations of Postmemory (with Emmanual Alloa and Pierre Bayard, Journal of Literature and Trauma Studies, 4, 2015), Archives au présent (with Patrick Nardin, Catherine Perret, Anna Seiderer, Presses universaitaires de France, 20017), Cambodge, cartographie de la mémoire (with Patrick Nardin and Suppya Nut, L’Asiathèque, 2017), Le paysage après coup ? (with Patrick Nardin Naima, 2022), Rwanda, l’atelier de la mémoire. Des archives à la création (with Pierre Bayard, Naima, 2022).
About the program
In 1975, Soko Phay fled Phnom Penh with her family due to the Khmer Rouge, eventually finding their way to France. This experience has a lasting impact on the focus of her subsequent research. In this episode, she shares her experience researching art as resistance against extreme violence and her research project integrating memory, archives, and artistic creation, “Memory Workshop.” She introduces the idea of “archive-œuvre,” which she uses to describe the results of the collaboration between archives and artworks produced in “Memory Workshop.” She states that “archive-œuvre” combines the “coherence of truth” and the “revelation of truth.” As a method of practice, “Memory Workshop” provides an opportunity for the post-memory generation born after the Khmer Rouge to engage with history directly. The host also mentions similar experiences of Taiwanese art workers, along with the challenges and discourses involving similar topics.
＊The Chinese version of the part of speaker and French version of the part of hosts uses AI technology generate from original voice.
French:
Chinese:
EP4|
LIU Tzu-Chi
Owner of Bai-Shiang Music Studio. Music director, sound designer, music consultant, and music coordinator, contributing to over a hundred productions and events.
My work encompasses a broad range of music types and scopes, including both traditional and modern music genres. I specialize in blending and re-creating music from various genres and ethnicities into modern musical works. In my musical expressiveness, I often utilize the immediacy and interactivity of electronic live performances to strengthen the connection between sound and work, exploring more possibilities and allowing music to become another narrative thread that merges with the present space and time. In 2021, along with Chang Ya-Wei, I co-founded the invitation-only White Elephant Club, seeking a complex audio-visual experience for music and audiences. In my personal music career development, I also focus on contemporary sound and cross-disciplinary music collaboration as key development areas.
About the program
EP5| An East-West Intersection—Sounds of Protests from Georgia
Aleksi Soselia
Aleksi Soselia is a curator and artist based in Tbilisi, Georgia. Born on 1988, he has been actively involved in the art scene, focusing on social changes, future perspectives, and conceptual, idea-based transformations. He is known for his work at the Center of Contemporary Art in Tbilisi, where he has been the Executive Director since 2016. Aleksi’s involvement in the art world includes founding and co-founding several initiatives. He is the co-founder of Parallel Class, an experimental education platform for youth and adults, and the co-founder of the Georgian Video Art Archive project launched in 2014. Throughout his career, Aleksi has curated and organized numerous exhibitions and educational projects, including the Tbilisi Triennials in 2012, 2015, and 2018, and the Georgian Video Art Archive Exhibitions starting from 2014. He has also curated projects such as “Dependance / Independence” at the Frankfurt Book Fair in 2018. He has also participated in talks and presentations on Georgian video art and contemporary art practices at various institutions and events. In “X-class” at CCA-Tbilisi, 2019, Aleksi orchestrated an environment where art and education intersect, challenging conventional notions of learning. Collaborating as a co-curator for “Rivers Magic Garden” in Tbilisi, 2019, he transformed the exhibition space into a whimsical realm where nature and imagination intertwine.
About the program
In this episode, Georgian artist and curator Aleksi Soselia take some time off from his protest work against the foreign agents law to share with Taiwanese audiences the social influences from the Soviet Union eras, artistic interventions of the past and present governments, and his observations along with some examples of how video artists from the previous generations dealt with these interventions. In addition, he talks about the contemporary art programs offered by the Archive of Georgian Video Art, which he co-founded, and that of Center of Contemporary Art – Tbilisi, to reflect on the absence of art history in the lives of the Post Totalitarian Caucasus generation and the possibilities generated by the agency of art in a society that embraces diversity and inclusiveness.
EP6-1｜Records of Voyages along the Silk Road
EP6-2｜Under the Surface (feat. HUANG Ya-Nung)
HUANG Ya-Nung
Born in Taiwan, HUANG Ya-Nung is a multi-discipline artist working among graphic design, illustration, photography and video. She’s also a musician playing “Suona”, a traditional double reed wind instrument. With sensitivity of social awareness, Ya-Nung has dived into art field since graduate education and her research was about power relationship between human being and space. She has gradually developed her artistic approach: integrating video, sound, body movement and installation in order to research “interaction of people and space” and create dialogue in between.
Besides, with years traditional music training, Ya-Nung playing not only Suona, but also other wind instruments such as Flute, Guan, Kachuang, Koxian, Bawu, Hulusi. She is experiences on orchestra, ensemble, and concerto. However, Ya-Nung tends to break the frame and approach fusion, including pop, jazz, latin and even art of noise. She’s trying to dig out possibilities of sounds rather than music. Furthermore, Ya-Nung also embeds body movement with improvisation performance in order to proceed contemporary transformation of traditional music. In 2023, she was invited by Lacking Sound Festival to join the performance tour to Germany, UK, Poland and CZ, to collaborate with electric modular synthesizer.
About the program
Under the Surface is part of the sound and music project created by the artist HUANG Ya-Nung in 2024. For this project, she visited various countries along the Silk Road, including Iran, Armenia, Turkey, Cyprus, and Greece.
Her journey began with “suona,” which originated in Persia, and investigated how the musical instrument evolved in different regions throughout history. This included “sornay” in Iran, “duduk” in Armenia, “zurna” in Turkey, and “aulos” in ancient Greece. Apart from meeting with local musicians, she engaged in improvised performances with them. The title of this piece is inspired by “Baaz Baran” (باز باران), a poem written by Golchin Gilani that has been adapted by several poets into different socially sarcastic versions. This episode features her improvised performance with Iranian musicians in Tehran, shedding light on various local issues related to gender, ethnic groups, and society.
This sound and music project is still ongoing. The artist plans to travel along the Silk Road and explore the route, which reflects the historical evolution of “suona” in new cities and areas.