Ling Liu

Chinese poetry, writing, and painting (like all cultural forms of expression) in the context of Chinese aesthetics, contain both meaning and form.

This work, of experimental vocal and visual performance, is an attempt to disclose/reveal (with sonic-visual space) the formative rhythmic patterns that constitute deeply rooted traditions of Chinese cultural expression.

In their important study, Words and Images: Chinese Poetry, Calligraphy, and Painting, Wen C. Fong and Alfreda Murck clearly articulated the special importance of the reciprocal link between image and language:

The relationship between words and images in Chinese art developed from one of complementary illustration to one of complex integration – with a major shift occurring during the late Song and the early Yüan (1271-1368a.d.) painters turned increasingly to symbolism. When eventually the image became overladen with symbolic meaning, it could no longer be expressed without the help of language. (Fong and Murck 1991: xv)

This ultimate integration means words and images no longer exist without each other. Poetry, calligraphy and painting together became a kind of mixed art form, one element is always within another.

If we think of aesthetics as artistic principles or rules that underlying the creation of art. Then what is the basic aesthetics underlying the creation of Chinese traditional art, especially the integration of poetry, calligraphy and painting, or in another word, sound and visual?

Yu-kung Kao uses the term ‘lyric aesthetics’ to describe the underlying principles that are basic to all ‘representational’ art, which represents art that aims to present mental images and emotional states rather than to reflect the physical world realistically. So in the context of lyric aesthetics, these three simple art forms were transformed into a comprehensive integration, which represents the lyric aesthetics underlying it.

If the relationship between poetry, calligraphy and painting can be integrated in the context of lyric aesthetics, what is the relationship between sound and visual? What kind of integrated artistic form can be produced?

As a ‘preface’ to the more extensive and detailed examination of the complex linkages in my performative works, Hearing Rhythm, Seeing Rhythm II, is both an experiment and a demonstration of the way in which, to use the French phrase ‘son-image’ (or sound image) can be articulated.

Sound Work

2022

20min33sec

The sound starts with the repeated singing of poetry, and the drawings show the process of drawing the sound patterns while listening to the vocal performance. The visual movement became the record of the sound. Then the feedback from the process of the drawing, the gestures, the movement, the passion, joined in the sound work as a form of noise.

Therefore, the sound piece itself became a complex integrated art form of vocal and visual expressions.

The Full Sound Work

Visual Work

Ink on rice paper

All 140 x 35cm

Meanwhile, the paintings are a kind of rhythmic drawings of the accumulation of painted sonic gestures.

They are all different and layered up, as how they were presented in the vocal performance. And the repetition of the paintings tells the repetition of the listening experiences as well.

Then once again, the noise from the sound component feed back into the paintings with the ink and brush, thus, as Su Shi (苏轼, 1037 - 1101 a.d.) once said, “poetry in painting and painting in poetry.”

Video

20min33sec

Altogether, Hearing Rhythm, Seeing Rhythm II is a sonic-visual work still working with rhythm and poetry, as the previous series of Hearing Rhythm, Seeing Rhythm.

At the same time, this is an experiment dealing with the integration, transformation, and the creativity of artistic forms in the context of Chinese lyric aesthetics.

The Full Video Work

Exhibition Document

《听·见·韵》分为“ 听·韵” 和“见·韵”两个部分, 是以传统诗词为根，诗词中的韵律为骨，声音为媒，继而以传统水墨画的形式诉诸于笔端，使之成为声音的视觉“抄录”的多媒体装置作品。这是一个以现代的表达媒介为手段, 以传统的诗词韵律为核心的艺术作品。通过声音、影像、多媒体空间装置等当代艺术表达媒介与诗词, 绘画等传统表现形式的互相传递与结合来探讨“韵律”的存在与表达,及其背后的规律与历史。

Chinese poetry, speech, music, writing (like all cultural forms of expression) contain both meaning and form. In this, and for centuries, rigorous Rules of Rhythm have been the foundation of lyrical expression.

This work, of experimental vocal and visual performance, is an attempt to disclose/reveal (with voice and Chinese painting) the formative rhythmic patterns that constitute deeply rooted traditions of Chinese cultural expression. Both painting and singing in Chinese are embodied forms - incorporating intricate vocal nuances and subtly ‘drawn’ gestures. Rather than considering the textual content of the poems or lyrics, in these works I focus instead on sound patterns, lyrical intonation, rhythmic precision, and forms of drawing rhythm.

“《听·见·韵》是我的博士研究项目《声音的层次: 传统中国审美中的韵律表达在当代声音和影像艺术创作中的可能性》的一个组成部分。这个项目意在于以艺术创作为切入点探讨前现代中国历史及传统中国文化在当代中国的生存状态, 以及当我们试图回收传统中国文化, 重新追问中国文化的本体时, 我们该如何处理我们已经全然现代化和深刻西化的文化自我与传统历史及文化主体之间的关系。我们的创生性在哪里, 我们的未来在哪里?”

‘Hearing Rhythm, SeeingRhythm’ is a part of my PhD research project, Acoustic Layers, How can traditional ‘Rules of Rhythm’ in Chinese aesthetics applied across contemporary creative practices, via sound and visual.

This is a project taking artistic practice as an entry point, aiming to deal with the existence of pre-modern Chinese history and traditional Chinese culture in contemporary China. When we try to retrieve traditional culture and re-ask the ontology of Chinese culture, how do we deal with the relationship between the deeply modernized and Westernized cultural reality and the traditional history, culture and the aesthetics come with them?

—— LING LIU

Exhibition Document

Chinese poetry, speech, music, writing (like all cultural forms of expression) contain both meaning and form. In this, and for centuries, rigorous Rules of Rhythm have been the foundation of lyrical expression.

This work, of experimental vocal and visual performance, is an attempt to disclose/reveal (with voice and Chinese painting) the formative rhythmic patterns that constitute deeply rooted traditions of Chinese cultural expression. Both painting and singing in Chinese are embodied forms - incorporating intricate vocal nuances and subtly ‘drawn’ gestures.

Rather than considering the textual content of the poems or lyrics, in these works I focus instead on sound patterns, lyrical intonation, rhythmic precision, and forms of drawing rhythm.

2021

Sound Installation

11min30sec

The Sad Zither is a vocal performance investigating the formal repetition of rhyme schemes within individual textural phrases or poetic patterns based on the poem by Li Shangyin (Tang Dynasty, a.d.813-858).

The Full Sound Work

2022

Sound Installation

7min30sec.

Yumeiren (Tune): Spring Flower and Autumn Moon is a vocal performance slowly disassembles the intricately articulated ‘elements’ of Chinese characters in a way that ruptures rhythm, which is based on the lyric by Li Yu (Southern Tang, a.d.937-978).

The Full Sound Work

2022

Video

6min44sec

Paint the Rhythm I is an attempt to represent the singing of poetry in ‘real-time;’ a form of performed visual transcription using traditional gestures of Chinese painting as visual correlates to rhythmic aural patterns and tactile impulses.

2022

Ink on rice paper

All 68x34cm

Paint the Rhythm II continues the experiment of Rhythm I - instead onto traditional Chinese Rice Paper as a kind of rhythmic landscape of the accumulation of painted sonic gestures.

Exhibition Info

Multimedia installation work

Full documenting video of the multimedia installation work 韵 echoed

please put the headphone on while watching this video

Singing Poems

layers of time and layers of voices

Listen to the sound pieces on soundcloud

please put the headphone on while listening to the sound pieces

The evolution of Chinese characters

Boy Go Fishing

Here are the full videos

Version 1

Version 2

Rhythm in the traditional writing

Here is the full video of Calligraphy Writing

Relationship between writing and vocal

Here is the full video

Documenting video of experiencing the multimedia installation work 韵 echoed

This is a 4 minutes long introduction video of the piece.

This is a short video of the design of the installation space of Her Life

The full headphone version of Her Life can be listened at SoundCloud

Please use headphones while listening to the piece.

Sound installation work

Sound installation work

Sound Installation work

This is the sound installation work I made recently. It is a multi-track surround sound mixing piece played with four speakers in a dark empty room.

The full headphone editing version: https://soundcloud.com/user-49179852/happy-birthday-love

The VR Version, which collaborated with the Chameleon Gallery can be experienced at https://www.chameleongallery.net/ling-liu.html

One of the four projections

The installation for the work in a show

One of the Tube speakers I made, playing the whispering sound

This is a installation of this piece that I made for a show. It is a multimedia installation, combined with six audio channels and three video channels.

Full sound tracks: https://soundcloud.com/user-49179852/sets/howdoyouseetheworld

Full Videos

How do you see the world?

How do I see the world?

How are you?

Are you happy?

How do you talk to your passed friend?

How does he response?

How do you say goodbye?

Do you look back?

What’s there?

Can you look back?

Can you hear me?

Can you see me?

You are not fine…

You don’t look fine.

Where am I?

I am nowhere.

I am everywhere.

What can you see through the light?

What can you see through the shadows?

Exhibited display of art piece, Shadows

Digital Photograph 1

Digital Photograph 2

Digital Photograph 3

Digital Photograph 4

We believe that Identity Consumerism is a method that the society, or whoever is in charge of the society would like to use to control the culture system and to stabilize the intelligence of the society. In these couple years, TV programs like <Produce 101>, <Idol Producer> became very popular in Eastern Asia. “Idols” are being produced, they are products of the market. And the fan market is their target. Fans and some agents became cheap labors for this market; they became the third-party instigators on the internet to massively, repeatedly over-share the information. And this phenomenon became a surreal and toxic phenomenon in present social media world.

Zelffie on Alex Fabulous Show

2018 New Single

Heart Beat Strategy is the new single we made and “released“ for Zelffie. This is a very cute, sexy and very Eastern Asian style pop song.

With this song, we deal with the topic of Female Identity. Because of this market and this consumerism of identity, female identity here became a pattern. We all started to have a stereotype of female “idols” in our mind, the looks, the body shapes, the cuteness, the sexual attraction… So the consumerism of female identity made female “idols” into a kind of public entertainment machine, which for us, as female artists at this time became a huge problem.

2020 New Single

BILINDWORSHIP is the new single we made and “released“ for Zelffie.

Please follow us on Weibo @Zelffie

Here is Zelffie's Instagram Page, come follow us!!! @zelffie_official

Want to know more about our dearest Zelffie? Please visit zelffie.org

2018

2018

2018

2018

2018

2018

2018

2018

I still see it

I still hear it

I still dream about it

I still feel it