Xu / Livingston Installation terminated, Justin Zhong in London

by lawrence

Weird thing is, every time I stopped updating for a few days, my subscribers number would go up a little bit (as shown in the small pink logo in the sidebar). I must be so narccisic to follow it every minute during the regular-updated period.

The news today is that the first large-scale sound installation in the public space of mainland China has been officiallly terminated. This work by renowned New York-based Chinese artist XU Bing and musician / sound designer Hugh Livingston was documented in the very days of GNO (see this and this), it was designed to function as a kind of sonic game, where people are surrounded by soundscape as a manipulated result of the sounds produced by their unintentional action and picked up by the hidden microphones. The installation was supposed to be built in a residential community in the suburbia of Guangzhou (whose future residents would possibly be able to wander around an unusual art museum designed by Rem Koolhaas’ OMA and being built now), and yes, the original commissioner / funder is but the real estate developer, namely Times Group, themselves. Why they pulled the plug is something I don’t want to waste your time reading about, as someone who was involved in the project, I can assure you that it’s another classic example of what you would call “a Chinese thing”. What a pity, it could have been a cool work, at least technically.

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Justin Zhong is in London right now working on a project with the multimedia group D-Fuse, whose members travelled to several Chinese cities collecting audio / video materials for their performance in the UK. Zhong’s being invited is somewhat like an exchange program, he’ll be doing field-recording there for two weeks (started last week) and play a gig or two if possible. If you are interested in having him performs in the next week, feel free to drop him a line at stumble50 [at] hotmail [dot] com.




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