Karimah Ashadu 

Kobby Adi

Sophia Al-Maria

Ryoko Aoki

Cory Arcangel

Martha Atienza

Ed Atkins

Charles Atlas

Lutz Bacher

Darren Bader

Martin Beck

Dara Birnbaum

Zheng Bo

Dineo Seshee Bopape

Nate Boyce

Sonia Boyce

Candice Breitz

Maeve Brennan

Duncan Campbell

Jonathan Lyndon Chase

Monster Chetwynd

Kwan Sheung Chi

Adam Chodzko

Chan Hau Chun

Tony Cokes

Stephanie Comilang

Alex Da Corte

AFSAR × DAVRA

Jeremy Deller

Yang Dingliu

Shannon Ebner

Angus Fairhurst

Jes Fan

Luke Fowler

Nikita Gale

Theaster Gates

Samia Halaby

Lawrence Abu Hamdan

Barbara Hammer

Richard Hawkins

Rei Hayama

Camille Henrot

James T. Hong

Jonathan Horowitz

Miyu Hosoi

Tishan Hsu

Andrew Thomas Huang

Tao Hui

Yee I-Lann

AKI INOMATA

Evan Ifekoya

Takahiro Inamori

Sanja Iveković

Arthur Jafa

Derek Jarman

Yu Ji

Eisa Jocson

Joan Jonas

Corinne de San Jose

Mike Kelley

Sin Wai Kin

Lee Kit

Marc Kokopeli

Vvzela Kook

Friedrich Kunath

Alan Kwan

Tang Kwok-Hin

Christopher Landoni

Carolyn Lazard

Mark Leckey

Kang Seung Lee

Florence Yuk-ki Lee

Lawrence Lek

Shuang Li

Klara Liden

Enzo Camacho & Ami Lien

Quỳnh Lâm

Jill Magid

Diego Marcon

Helen Marten

Taro Masushio

Jennifer and Kevin McCoy

Shala Miller

Sarah Morris

Takeshi Murata

SAGG Napoli

Bruce Nauman

Shirin Neshat

Tuan Andrew Nguyen

Thenjiwe Niki Nkosi

Ho Tzu Nyen

Lydia Ourahmane

Tony Oursler

Xiaofei Mo & POND

Gary-Ross Pastrana

Yuri Pattison

Ellen Pau

Imran Perretta

Sondra Perry

Paul Pfeiffer

From Its Mouth Came a River of High- End Residential Appliances

2018
Princess Grace Graduate Film Honoraria Award
Images Festival OCADU Off Screen Award

2010 
Theresa Hak Kyung Cha Award from the Berkeley Art Museum (BAM)

b. 1986, U.S; lives and works in New York, U.S.

WangShui’s practice incorporates moving images, film, installation, painting, sculpture, and architecture to explore contemporary notions of desire. The work explores divergent structures of perception which seeks to integrate diverse personal experiences and research into trauma, architecture, and media. While the practice is polyvocal and wide-ranging, the articulation and holding of liminality is a central theme in the work. WangShui holds up liminal space for its radical potential as a form of resistance. The work often addresses the latent space of images and materials as a way to activate the non-binary, border conditions between things; detail and distance, transparency and opacity, knowing and unknowing.

, JULIE STOSCHEK COLLECTION, Berlin (2019); 

, ArkDes (Swedish Center for Architecture & Design), Stockholm, Sweden (2019); 

GHOST: 2561 Performance & Video Triennial

, Anonymous Gallery, Mexico City (2016); and 

, Samuel Dorsky Museum of Art, New York (2015).

For further information about this artist please click 

WangShui

If the camera is the body and the lens the skin, it becomes almost entirely undetectable, as it mirrors its surroundings while recording.

(2023), the epic showdown between Floyd Mayweather Jr. and Manny Pacquiao finds Mayweather erased from the footage, a ghost the mind wraps around. Pacquiao ducks and sways before an etched collective memory. His gloves cover his head. He quivers with hits from a figure we might easily fill in, or have to find a reminder of. I try to watch as many times as possible, holding off from watching the original fight. As I do so, I pay more attention instead to where my eyes tend to focus when the central drama is cut and drained from the scene. I look at the eyes of the crowd, which move together, tracking the two’s dance, narrowing at each hit. The viewer shapes her mind around a void, strays to the MOTOLITE on Pacquiao’s waistband, the blue of the MGM GRAND across the mat.

Fights of the century like this are cited as media tipping points, offering a rare convergence: dense layers of sensory, political and quasi-spiritual spectacle. This fight was wildly anticipated for years, hotly covered, watched by many millions and then debated for the decade after. Many felt the fight was five years too late past each boxer’s prime, and that Pacquiao’s technical proficiency and number of blows should have secured the win. Pacquiao – the people’s hero – sustained a shoulder injury. Any clean opposition became less clear. This was one of the few fights in which Mayweather was forced to move, duck, and run around the ring. It was unusual to see Pacquaio in as many defensive postures as offensive, ducking, stepping back, pushed, even thrown against the ropes, which the artist’s edit highlights. In this edit, 

 gets as much credit for his defensive skill, taking serious hits in the face and head that would send most to the ground. Finished. We can admire Mayweather’s ghost’s technical precision. He was strategic and bided his time, even if he was less of a showman.

The sheer weight of expectation bearing down on this fight heightens the drama of what’s unseen, namely, all the puppeteering hands pulling on lines of tension, orchestrating the scene. The dance of the two was on a set before an audience both real and imagined, against a backdrop diamond-sharp in its symbolism. Pfeiffer’s choreographed edit nudges us to hold all that is off-screen as we watch. The interruption between the image and what is expected turns us to what is not there, what is outside the frame. We orient towards what might be working beyond view. A body in motion, seen through the filter of absence, through the language of speculation, betting, through the crowd’s gaze, through our imagining and our memory of his opponent in this lucrative spectacle. We watch Pacquiao’s squints, mouthed deep breaths, his expressions of grim determination. Muscles move in waves across his back and arms with each heavier punch. The camera flips views, second to second. We drift to the crowd, to the god’s-eye view, the isometric view, to the ring mat, to the back, to the shoulders of Pacquiao. 

The whole place is silent, allowing us to concentrate. We can note the improvisational, emergent aspects of the fight; there are brief smiles, moments of acknowledgement, hugs right before the final round. There is begrudging and mutual respect, if totally different styles. And there is a deep understanding on the part of each athlete that their image, and their performance in the game, is all. Pfeiffer notes in a recent interview that he was riveted to find Mayweather owns the rights to the fight, and so likely has the highest-resolution footage.

 A direct feed into the minds of the watching.

Watching Pacquiao dodge before the ghost memory figure of Mayweather, caught from every camera angle, I am reminded of Jena Osman’s challenging book 

(2019). Osman looks so closely at the details of how cameras evolved across human history that we feel her prose start to move with the cameras. As the power of visual capture accelerates, becomes more wily and tied to technological systems that are themselves more difficult to see (beyond the interface, at work through computation, or quite literally concealed), Osman argues that we must think as fluidly, deftly, with as much skilful movement. Motion technologies have their poetry, and our best possible role given their increasing speed, scale and power is to develop a critique of the moving image that lyrically moves with cameras, asking and answering the questions their movement makes possible.

, along with other videos in the long-running 

 suite, Pfeiffer uses spatially responsive and deft, fluid editing techniques to ask for a thinking and thought that meets them in flux, cutting and moving with the eye. These works blend jump cuts, speculation and documentary not just to ‘speak to’ how oversaturation, surveillance, and economic and cultural power are managed and mediated through these spectacles. The works, through what’s in absentia, ask the viewer to turn their eye and mind beyond the frame, to poke into what is unseen and what sits right beyond. Why did we see what we saw, in this way, framed in these terms?

Collective cultural memories, like the endlessly proliferated media of a great fight, are continually reworked much like individual memories. New theories, more critical analyses of digital media and sophisticated technical systems, more savvy media literacy attuned to algorithmic orchestration attune us more to what is not seen. There’s an understanding that we need to be as much critical visual readers as readers of what is beyond the frame, as power now primarily unfolds and operates beneath or beyond the visual realm, even as visual evidence provides many sigils and clues. Our collective memories are partial, contingent and far more malleable than our externalized prostheses of artificial memory, our media storehouses, might suggest. Despite computational logic’s insistence, memories are not like files stored on hard drives, retrieved simply at will through a database, sorted in a table of contents. They necessitate retrieval, prompted by association or a trigger (a madeleine, a scent), and story and context to activate them, and active retelling. ‘We’ are collectively prone to embellishment and error in remembering, to selectively forgetting, to blocking.

As we consider the diverse dislocating formal techniques Pfeiffer deploys, I turn to the artist WangShui’s 

From Its Mouth Came a River of High- End Residential Appliances 

(2019). In this 13-minute film, we coast in a continual motion, as though on the nose or head of a dragon, through the Dragon Gate, a famous type of square-and-curved void in massive, absolutely overwhelming high-rises in Hong Kong that dizzy the mind with their density and spectacle. Such Dragon Gates are built so ‘spirit dragons’, carrying good 

, positive, auspicious, fortunate energy, can flow easily from the tops of the hills to the sea, to drink from the sea, and return in the evening. The dragons are mythological, spiritually significant, and ‘real’ in the sense that many demigods and mythical beings are ‘alive’ in the collective imagination.

Each building’s gate implies a connection of the man-made to the sky, sea and mountains around. We listen to the artist describe themselves and collaborator Hercules, aiming their drone towards Bel-Air, a complex on the sea. We look at three dragon gates and hear the narrator: ‘Hercules launches the drone, and we watch it fly towards the first hole.’ The architectural respect for this type of urban feng shui is evident in skyscrapers across the city. Further, as we learn in the film’s story, many practitioners of feng shui – banned in the PRC in 1949 – fled to Taiwan and Hong Kong in the late 1960s to escape persecution. Tied to geomancy techniques, we learn, the buildings embed an ecological understanding that may not be immediately apparent but is essential to consider. A building will respond to wind, to movement in the ground, and can hardly be built well without consideration of the natural and artificial systems in motion all around.

In the film, we move along a smooth, rigorously focused motion right through the centre of one dragon gate. These gate-voids, WangShui describes, refuse monumentalism and resist ideology. We are ourselves as viewers possibly coasting on the unseen energy that would lead dragons from the mountains out into the sea. As we edge closer to the first dragon gate, we see the sea, the pink and purple and blue soft sky above it, framed by the garden walkway of the gate, which residents ostensibly can step out onto. We see tankers and huge ships on the sea. We are told the drones will likely lose reception as they pass through, so we are refused the passing through; the scene changes to a new drone shot, approaching another dragon gate. Because we never quite know if the drone, the dragon, ever passes through, a void forms further in the narrative and the imagined flow of an ancient or future dragon we might be simulating.

As we course on towards the second gate, our sense of our ‘eye’ and view, and what vantage we are looking from, and what we are, destabilizes narratively and, perhaps, mentally. WangShui describes the dragon they ‘have in mind’, which takes on their name, has no body, and is perhaps a kind of camera-like eye, shuttering, shifting between endless vantage points, generating ‘an infinite live image’ of the artist. A tired voice on the final, third drone journey expresses a mournful desire to escape the tyranny of positive images, to find an escape from fixed identity. We hear: ‘If the camera is the body and the lens the skin, it becomes almost entirely undetectable, as it mirrors its surroundings while recording.’ And indeed, this ghostly camera, impossible to see, implied and hidden away, is mythic, mythologized, the roving, hidden eye of our time. WangShui’s intentional edits turn our gaze towards what is out of frame.

As Margot Norton argues, we find that ‘the unseen, the “void,” the shifting, formless, inexplicable, and otherworldly [are] often exalted in WangShui’s work – the immaterial as primary material’.

 By speaking of the immaterial as we move towards a void, we think on myth, history, persecution, urban architecture, yes: all lenses we can read the work through. But just as important as the legible and clear ‘reasons’ for the void, WangShui argues for our consideration of system mechanics and movements beyond sight. In fact, they insist on the otherworldly, the void, that is at the centre of our own knowing, at the centre of any frantic neoliberal search to pin down identity, narrative, as a fixed set of factors. No, the artist and this work seem to say: the void and the abyss are the point, turning our thinking outward, towards the edge, towards what needs consideration.

The void, in both these works, allows us to consider other tellings, and consider the illegible, hard to narrate aspects of spectacles of power, the non-visual aspects, found around the edges of the void, in the approach 

the void. Both works refuse an omniscient and single camera gaze, moving us as viewers towards the collective nature of watching, while refusing any single, seductive ritualized viewing. In looking at each artist’s formal strategies of dislocation, roving and destabilization, we can respect their respective approaches to showing what’s just beyond the frame – politically, socially, culturally – and all we learn in absentia.

Focusing on the void, we find the disembodied, watching power right at the edge of its frame. At the edge of the void is collection, management, organized stories, coherent narratives, clear power binaries. The state, the corporation, the algorithmic media life world, the surveillant, the entire topography of power shifts in the present, a many-eyed dragon impossible to see, above the ring, coursing above the crowd. In erasing the fighter, refusing the pleasure of passing through, repeated, each time, we learn how to recognize how power – its ideology – roots in the mind. Who won, and why. The void refuses the closed story, opening up dynamic paths beyond the frame and showing the cost of ignoring what is there, waiting to be read. 

Notes

Biographies 

Vs. (Fight of the Century)

Extract from From Its Mouth Came a River of High- End Residential Appliances, 2019

In Absentia

screening

How strange, now, to remember that it all began with the story of a young man murdering his wife. At the turn of the millennium, the rapper Eminem released the single ‘Stan’, and its music video remains a fascinatingly recursive bit of business about celebrity, fandom and the very fine line between devotion and obsession. The actor Devon Sawa, somewhere near the height of his fame, plays an Eminem devotee named Stan, and because Stan dresses like his idol, what results is a vision of stardom as glimpsed through a cracked funhouse mirror: a celebrity disguised as a fan, who in turn is disguised as another celebrity entirely. Stan sends Eminem letters that begin as declarations of something close to love, and then quickly develop into threats; by the song’s climax, he is drunk, driving his car off a bridge with his screaming, pregnant wife in the boot. ‘Stan’ is notable for putting Eminem, as the object of affection whose failure to respond makes a man turn to violence, into what might be described as a feminized position – stardom arguably being a feminized position by default, with its extreme surveillance, its image-focused judgement, its frequent sexualization and, above all else, its insistence that a person can be public property. (It is, of course, still the only female character in the song who ends up being the victim of the murderer: a girl-proxy for the star.) Even the use of the Dido sample in the chorus, fluttery and insipid, gestures ironically towards the notion of fan admiration as a twisted, unrequited form of romance.

That this music video is the source of the popular contemporary slang word ‘stan’ – a double-duty verb and noun meaning ‘to worship a celebrity’ and ‘one who worships a celebrity’ – is so perverse that it scarcely feels possible, and yet the more one thinks about it, the more perfectly appropriate this perversion is. Consciously or not, those who self-identify as stans are positioning themselves as something beyond mere fans, not simply vis-à-vis their level of devotion, but in the sense that there is something primal, tribal and a little frightening about their passion. To identify with a character like Stan seems like madness, and yet doing so only underscores how genuinely mad it is to love a stranger in the way so many people love distant, dazzling stars they can never hope to meet. The impulse is also in keeping with the general extremity of contemporary language around fandom, and the multifarious forms of desire this language expresses: wanting to be the famous idol, to fuck them, for them to be 

, to be killed by them with a hammer or a car, to slip into their skin. With regard to this last point, the New Jersey-born, Philadelphia-raised artist Alex Da Corte has made the inhabiting of Eminem’s skin, in particular, into a bona fide art form: in the early 2010s, he began to periodically embody Eminem in his practice, for a series of works in which he sought to explore what it might mean to be, as he put it in 

 magazine in 2017, ‘blonde, straight, and this ferocious person with power’, rather than the ‘young, not quite out of the closet, Hispanic man’ he was when the rapper first went mainstream.

 Perhaps this is another of the less common functions of stanning a celebrity: it allows us to imagine ourselves as possessing their ease and their authority, especially if they happen to be hot, rich, heterosexual and white.

Technically, it is not Eminem at all whom Da Corte impersonates, but Eminem’s performed second self, the puckish and politically incorrect Slim Shady: a bleach-blond, foul-mouthed manifestation of America’s id. When un-famous people have split personalities or pretend to be someone they are not, they are judged to be insane or are pilloried for being ‘fake’. When very famous people do the same thing, they are said to be maintaining a persona. Lapses in persona, during which a star briefly drops their public act and appears to be as boring as the rest of us, are thrilling precisely because of their unusual mundanity.

(2013) is a homage to a vignette from the 1982 film 

 by the Danish filmmaker Jørgen Leth. In the original clip, Andy Warhol eats a Burger King Whopper in real time, an image so quintessentially Pop and all-American that the fast-food chain repurposed it wholesale as a Superbowl advert in 2019. In Da Corte’s recreation, the artist records himself in costume as Eminem eating Cinnamon Life cereal, the set-up virtually identical but for the fact that the backdrop, in lieu of a featureless grey, is the vivid, 

 green used in green-screen technology – a visual joke, perhaps, about projection, and the way that celebrities invite it simply by virtue of being.

Warhol himself might be said to have been something of a stan, a gossip obsessive who adored those whose fame sprang from qualities which he himself did not possess: beauty, glamour, heteronormative desires, a comfort with themselves that enabled them to move through the world as if walking on air. There were certain things, however, that he recognized as great societal equalizers – popular products, for example, whose ubiquity meant that their consumption transcended the boundaries of class, race, gender and sexuality. ‘What’s great about this country’, he observed in 

(1975), ‘is that America started the tradition where the richest consumers buy essentially the same things as the poorest. You can be watching TV and see Coca-Cola, and you can know that the President drinks Coke, Liz Taylor drinks Coke, and just think, you can drink Coke, too.’

 On a message board entitled The Shady Syndicate, a four-page thread is devoted entirely to photographs of Eminem eating fast food, suggesting that his fans have a particular interest in seeing him, in private moments, sharing their habits: 

you can know that the President eats McDonald’s, Eminem eats McDonald’s, and just think, you can eat McDonald’s, too. 

(‘He had that Hermes dinnerware on his jet tho [

],’ one user points out, ‘so who knows, maybe he’s fancy now.’

 Few things mark a president or a pop star out from the common man more readily, it must be said, than the ability to purchase a set of Hermès dinnerware for use on a jet – but perhaps the dishes in question were still being used to consume a Happy Meal.)

‘To watch someone eat’, Da Corte observed in a 2016 panel discussion alongside Leth, ‘is to see someone at their most vulnerable and basic state.’

Eating is, after all, a reminder of the basic functions of the body, and of every body’s status as a biological machine, regardless of their social or financial status in life. Everybody eats; everybody shits; everybody dies. The title of Da Corte’s 

is at once a nod to the public’s prurient interest in the everyday vulnerabilities of pop-culture icons – those instances in which they are, in tabloid parlance, ‘just like us’ – and a wry acknowledgement of the work’s many levels of falsehood, which are every bit as layered as the character play in the video for ‘Stan’: we are watching an artist doing an impersonation of a rapper, in a choreographed version of an act so quotidian that regular people do it somewhere around three times a day.

The initial catalyst for Da Corte’s decision to play Eminem in his work was a photograph of the musician taken at the Louvre: the oft-circulated one, in all likelihood, of him standing in front of the 

, half-scowling and half-pouting in a dark baseball cap.

Two eminently recognizable faces; two inscrutable 

. Da Corte’s friend sent him the image, having mistaken it at first for a photograph of him, in a reversal of the usual dynamic in which a civilian is told, as a bit of flattery, that they bear some vague resemblance to a star. A similar inversion of the typical order of subject and gaze takes place when we watch Da-Corte-as-Eminem eating his cereal, staring straight into the camera as if he is watching television – as if we have become the entertainment, slipping through to the other side of the screen, the formerly one-sided romance between celebrity and fan seeming finally to reach something close to requitement. Warhol once said that to make great art, ‘you need to let the little things that would ordinarily bore you suddenly thrill you’. Funny that this same shift in perspective – until even the way someone eats cereal becomes endlessly fascinating – is equally characteristic of fandom, and of falling in real, true-life love.

Biographies

Lesson

Pavel tbc

Su-Mei Tse

The Chinese ritual music system (禮樂, 

) of the Zhou dynasty (c. 1046–256 BCE) has been established for over three millennia, leaving traces that still reverberate through East Asian cultural practices. In Confucian philosophy, ritual (

) governed the external world – structuring relationships, regulating conduct and sustaining social harmony – while music (

) cultivated the internal world, aligning emotions with a greater cosmic order. Together, they shaped both moral subject and the political community. Yet the modern legacy of 

 is inseparable from the histories of nation-state formation, colonial disruption, feudalism and postcolonial reinscription. As Sima Qian (c. 145–86 BCE), a historian of the early Han dynasty, noted, ‘Ritual, music, punishments, and governance – all ultimately aim toward the same end: to unify people’s minds and thereby bring forth the path of good governance.’

 In this sense, sound was not autonomous but political; it was a means of social alignment, moral cultivation and state legitimacy.

Against this backdrop, I would like to argue that the works included in this screening programme can be read as subtle but incisive counterpoints to that legacy. Each confronts the entanglement of sound and order, yet none do so by monumentalizing ritual. Instead, they employ loops, repetitions, crescendos and estrangements to probe the structural affinities between music and governance. In weaving together the sonic disciplines, they reconfigure sound as a site of critique, suggesting how sonic structure – once an instrument of state control – might be decontextualized into spaces of multiplicity and suspension.

Classical music, with its codified rules and hierarchies, becomes Su-Mei Tse’s metaphor for social construction. 

(2019) begins with a close view of hands pressing into wet clay as it revolves on the wheel. The surface stretches, folds and reforms with each contact, registering even the smallest adjustment of touch. The process feels less like an object being produced than an ongoing exchange – thought slipping into action, action reshaping material, a rhythm where the intangible shapes the tangible in real time. The soundtrack underscores this rotation: a record spins and its needle catches in the flow, releasing faint bursts of static and hiss. Both wheel and turntable trace spirals of repetition, inscribing time into surface. As the sequence continues, the scattered crackle gradually fuses into a low, continuous drone. The sound loops grow louder until they envelop the listener in hypnotic suspension. The experience is seductive yet suffocating: a sonic demonstration of how repetition disciplines desire and moulds obedience, echoing the ancient function of 

. Tse exposes the cost of harmony – identity shaped into hollow regularity, pleasure inseparable from control.

 resonates with Michel Foucault’s account of disciplinary power, where repetition and surveillance mould the body into docility.

 The sonic loop becomes an invisible panopticon: no visible guard, no external enforcement, only the enveloping rhythm of regulation. Harmony here is not merely aesthetic but political, exposing how subjects are shaped by immersion in forms that appear natural yet are deeply ideological.

Gary-Ross Pastrana’s multi-channel video 

 (2018) sharpens this critique by immersing the viewer in three distinct yet intertwined settings: the relentless activity of a termite colony, the quiet labour of a piano repair workshop on the outskirts of Manila, and the stillness of an abandoned concert hall. Threading these worlds together are the voices of three narrators. A musician muses on the tenuous balance between order and chaos that underlies classical composition. A piano repairman speaks of termites eating through the very body of a European instrument, tracing histories of use and decay. A scientist describes the intricate and adaptive logic of termite society, where the death of a monarch merely triggers the elevation of another, a system of succession that destabilizes human notions of hierarchy.

This destabilization acquires sharper political edges when paired with Chopin’s 

. During Chopin’s lifetime, Poland was under the control of Russia, Prussia and Austria, and he often used his music to preserve the Polish national identity and express his grief and profound longing for his homeland. The mazurka, based on the Polish folk dance form, is a national form haunted by exile; in Pastrana’s video, it resounds in tension with the termites’ frenzied activity. The refinement of the piano – emblem of European sonic modernity – collides with the swarm’s decentralized adaptability. Where the mazurka embodies longing for homeland, the termites embody a form of collective resilience in which survival is not premised on hierarchy. Their leaderless communality contrasts sharply with the rigid structures of colonial and postcolonial Philippine society, in which hierarchies of race, class and culture were violently enforced.

The crescendo of piano against the swarm’s restlessness destabilizes binaries: order versus chaos, refinement versus disorder, human versus insect. Pastrana ‘rewilds’ the classical form, unsettling colonial inheritances of hierarchy and suggesting other forms of collective life – forms that are ecological, plural and non-hierarchical. As the historian Achille Mbembe argues, the colonial order was not only a regime of domination but also ‘a regime of separation’,

 producing rigid boundaries between colonizer and colonized, human and non-human. 

 undoes this separation, revealing porous boundaries where termites and piano interpenetrate, creating an assemblage that cannot be reduced to either refinement or ruin.

On the Collinear and Reflected on the Water 

(2018) complicates this trajectory by shifting from discipline and destabilization to estrangement. Over the image of a caged emu, a first-person poem describes the act of observing the same animal in a series of iterative, tautological phrases. Repetition here becomes a sonic cage, entrapping both subject and viewer. Unlike Tse’s sculpting loop, Hayama’s cycle refuses resolution; the projector’s mechanical clatter, combined with the redundancy of the poem, estranges the emu from our empathetic reach.

The refusal of empathy is critical. Where 

 once promised harmony – aligning human hearts through music – Hayama denies the viewer that comfort. The emu resists assimilation into human categories of feeling or meaning. Instead, we are confronted with the limits of identification: what does it mean to encounter a non-human being that cannot be subsumed into our systems of sense-making?

Hayama’s emu cannot ‘speak’ in human terms. The attempt to make it legible results only in tautology and distancing. Yet rather than lamenting this impasse, the work insists on its necessity: estrangement teaches us to respect opacity, to accept that not all relations resolve into harmony. Here, sound becomes a mystical experience – not as transcendence, but as an encounter with what remains irreducibly other.


What emerges through these works is a critique of both colonial and statist appropriations of sound. If 

 once synchronized bodies and calendars under the authority of the state, and if colonial modernity sought to enforce Western harmonics as refinement, then these works reveal other sonic pathways. Their political potential lies not only in sound’s capacity to regulate but also in its ability to open relations across difference – to reclaim it from imperial control as well as to relearn how humans inhabit sound in relation to the non-human. Postcolonial studies have long emphasized how colonialism restructured not only politics and economies but also sensoria – what could be heard, valued or silenced.

 Together, these works reopen the field of possibility, insisting that sound need not serve sovereignty but can reconfigure it to accommodate chaos, estrangement and plurality.

The Chinese ritual music system reveals how deeply sound has been entangled with governance. Its resonances persist in modern nationalist spectacles, where music still functions as a political aesthetic. National anthems, parades and orchestrated displays continue to draw on the legacy of 

, producing unity as an aesthetic of sovereignty. Yet the alternative sonic politics glimpsed in these works resist unity in favour of multiplicity. It invites humans to recognize themselves not as sovereign listeners but as participants in a wider ecology of sound – becoming with termites, estranged by emus, suspended in loops that both discipline and undo. Here, music ceases to be a ritual of obedience and becomes instead a site of becoming: where governance dissolves into the open textures of sound, and where mystical encounters with the non-human teach us how to live otherwise.

WangShui

Exhibitions

2025

Life of Robots: Reimagining the Humanoid, Copenhagen Contemporary, Denmark (group)

2024

WangShui, kurimanzutto New York, NY, U.S (solo)

Stranieri Ovunque – Foreigners Everywhere, 60th International Art Exhibition at the Venice Biennale, Venice, Italy (group)

2022

Quiet as It's Kept, Whitney Biennial, New York, USA (group)

2020

Cruising Pavilion, ArkDes (Swedish Center for Architecture & Design), Stockholm, Sweden (group)

2019

WangShui, JULIE STOSCHEK COLLECTION, Berlin, Germany (solo)

Open Call, The Shed, New York, USA (group)

Short Shadows, EMPAC, New York, USA (group)

2018

Projections, Elinor Bunin Munroe Film Center, New York, USA (group)

In Practice: Another Echo, SculptureCenter, New York, USA (group)

Cruising Pavilion, Spazio Punch Gallery, The 16th Venice Architecture Biennale, Venice, Italy (group)

GHOST: 2561 Performance & Video Triennial, Bangkok, Thailand (group)

Images Festival, Super 8 Hotel, Toronto, Canada (group)

2017

From its Mouth Came a River of High-End Residential Appliances, Triple Canopy, New York, USA (group)

We Need to Talk, Petzel Gallery, New York, USA (group)

Screening, Anonymous Gallery, Mexico City, Mexico (group)

2016

Are You a Sexual Being?, Jack Hanley Gallery, New York, USA (group)

APEC, 67 Gallery, New York, USA (group)

2014

Mental Furniture, Night Gallery, Los Angeles, USA (group)

2013

Screen Play, Samuel Dorsky Museum of Art, New York, USA (group)

2025

2024

2022

2020

2019

2018

2017

2016

2014

2013

Awards

2018

Princess Grace Graduate Film Honoraria Award

Images Festival OCADU Off Screen Award

2010

Theresa Hak Kyung Cha Award from the Berkeley Art Museum (BAM)

2018

2010