Fairs
Liste Art Fair Basel
2023
Chen Ting-Jung
Dislocated Voice
Booth 49
Dates_ June 12–18, 2023
Venue_ Messe Basel, Hall 1.1
2023
Chen Ting-Jung
Dislocated Voice
Booth 49
Dates_ June 12–18, 2023
Venue_ Messe Basel, Hall 1.1
Gallery Vacancy is pleased to present artist Chen Ting-Jung’s solo project Dislocated Voice at Liste Art Fair Basel 2023, stand 49. The presentation showcases a sound installation alongside a group of wall-mounted sculptures to explore the ideas of boundary and borderline which are not only shaped by histories, nations, and geographic entities, but also influenced by public agenda, group identity, and collective memories. With sound and echo resonating in the booth space and establishing an intangible acoustic territory, the wall-mounted sculpture pieces emulate the shapes of navigation buoys widely used to demarcate a body of water. The works allude to the fluid nature of sound and water, attempting to capture such physical property that is perpetually changing and flowing. The artist employs these elusive elements in her presentation to examine the relationship between space and body and how physical boundaries are reassessed and re-defined under different sovereignties.
The booth as a whole presents the artist’s field research in Kinmen, a group of islands located off the coast of mainland of China and the shoreline of Taiwan across the Taiwan Strait. In the sound installation Dislocated Voice (2022), Chen incorporates the whistling melody of “Good Night Song” (1979), a song written by Liu Chia-chang and sung by Fei Yu-ching and was broadcasted nightly from Kinmen as auditory propaganda to the mainland of China, piercing through the booth space. The overhanging microphones relentlessly swirl in circular motions with robotic arms and record sounds from the speaker as well as the booth space. Their movements create a sound field that variates and fluctuates due to the constantly changing distance between each speaker and microphone. The whistling echoes and ripples in incessant sound waves, fading but submerging one another to become an infinite cycle that embraces viewers while expanding itself. In the wall sculpture Let’s Say Good Night. Welcome to the Brand New Tomorrow. (2023), the music score of “Good Night Song” pierces through a galvanized plate, punctuating yet paralleling the form of bullet holes from war-damaged architecture surfaces. Further addressing the impact of war on the everyday life of people from Kinmen, this work illuminates the precarious experiences of oyster farmers whose working environment was constantly overshadowed by the propaganda messages sent from both coasts. The light allowed through the holes reveals the absence of a physical space, signifying the passage of time between sunrise and moonset; the 3D printed oyster shells scattering across the work, symbolizing the laboring experience across the land and the ocean. The memories and experiences of both body and time are blurred, masked under the minimal yet cold metal plate along with the silent music score. The sculpture series, Envelope, adapted the shapes of found buoys sourced by Chen from her journeys along numerous seashores and casted with free newspapers collected all over the world, aligning to form a new horizon across the booth. For the artist, buoys decarmate the physical territory while newspapers allegorize the invisible ruling and wrestling of ideologies. In this project, the newspaper-mache buoys stand as temporary consensus or complicity; the two materials cover each other and become interdependent, both contributing to nullifying the buoys’ function of separating territory on water. The confrontation within geopolitics filled with scare and contradiction is bound to be eventually forgotten and overlooked over the course of long history. Dislocated Voice introduces another form of language through the presentation: the unspoken words are illegible, hardly describable, yet carrying emotions and memories profoundly beyond the physical limitations. The sound recedes and emerges at the same time, revealing the complex historical context within the broader scope of geopolitics in East Asia. |
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