Sound in and around Yu-Hsiu Museum

The entrance corridor at Yu-Hsiu Museum is narrow and pale, with a translucent wall that admits the blurred shadows of leaves. Zhang Jun-Ci spent days moving through it. Sometimes she walked slowly or backward. Sometimes she lowered her body, covered her ears, closed her eyes or stopped. Her score from one morning begins with chickens calling from nearby farmland. Later pages mark insects after dark, passing cars, footsteps, wind, and a small sound of water whose source she could not find.

Zhang's new work, Corridor of Sound: Tuning in Between, remains in that passage. Small sound units, mirrors and pieces of notation appear along the route rather than gathering at a single point. The work has to share the corridor with the noises already there. Zhang describes it as a disappearing sound installation: when a visitor approaches one of its sounds, that sound weakens or vanishes. What remains may be the insects outside, shoes on the floor or wind against the building.

Listen to Zhang Jun-Ci's entrance-corridor recording. ↗

The score makes the work's preparation unusually legible. It is not a transcription in conventional musical notation. Drawn paths and written observations hold together where Zhang stood, what she heard and when a sound entered or disappeared. A photograph from the same research period shows her walking a wooded path near Jiǔjiǔ Peak with recording equipment. The mountain is close to the museum, but it does not arrive in the gallery as anonymous birdsong. It comes through particular walks and recordings.

Listen to one of Zhang Jun-Ci's Jiǔjiǔ Peak Forest Trail recordings. ↗

Wu Tsan-Cheng passed through the same entrance and kept going. For Memory of Sound: 10, he recorded along village lanes and forest paths, around the nearby settlement, at Pinglin Elementary School and Yong'an Temple, and during conversations with people who live nearby. Wu has spent more than a decade building his Taiwan Sound Map. Here, his recordings stay close to the places around Yu-Hsiu.

One of the museum's photographs catches that fieldwork plainly: Wu sits at a table with two people while his recorder rests between them. Another shows him in the entrance corridor, equipment in hand, looking out through the translucent wall. Memory of Sound: 10 includes voices and local histories as well as ambient sound, gathered through encounters, routes and time spent in place.

The finished four-channel installation is upstairs. Recordings are assigned to the room's four walls according to the direction from which Wu gathered them. A forest path, a school and a conversation are not arranged as a scenic sequence. Their positions preserve their bearings outside the museum.

Both works are part of Crippled Symmetries, Yu-Hsiu Museum's tenth-anniversary programme. Curator Lin Fang-Yi and co-curator Thomas Bruns developed the Nantou edition within a cross-national project initiated by Ensemble KNM Berlin around Morton Feldman's music, repetition and variation. The programme also includes thirteen Reading Music videos and a series of one-to-one musical encounters.

On September 12 and 13, Ensemble KNM Berlin, CUBE BAND, Loud Arts Chamber Ensemble and Curtain Sound Choir move through the museum in two reserved sessions each day. Works by Lin Fang-Yi, Lin Kuei-Ju and Ana Maria Rodriguez enter the route. Visitors who want to hear the live programme need a separate reservation for one of the four sessions.