听·见·韵

Hearing Rhythm, Seeing Rhythm

Hearing Rhythm, Seeing Rhythm is a series of multimedia installation works based on the rhythmic rules of traditional Chinese poetry. Poetry and lyrics are the essence of traditional Chinese culture, a rich part of pre-modern history that cannot be disregarded or erased, and even after thousands of years of development, rules of rhythm are still one of the most important foundations of the harmony and beauty of traditional poetry. Even in the May Fourth Movement, nor the Vernacular Chinese Movement, or the ‘New Poetry’ Reforms of the early 20^th century failed to break the Chinese people’s reverence for the beauty of rhyme in traditional poetry. Rhythm is indeed the root of Chinese language and the forms of thinking. However, as with many traditionally rooted cultural phenomena, it seems difficult to systematize the origin of their importance, or to communicate their significance to outsiders in an intuitive way. As a kind of reclamation of pre-modern history and traditional China, as well as an exploration of the creativity of contemporary multisensory art forms, Hearing Rhythm, Seeing Rhythm works as a bridge between the tradition and the modern, the East and the West, demonstrating the connection between poetry and painting/calligraphy, sound and visuals, and the pre-modern and the contemporary.  

Chinese poetry, calligraphy, and painting (like all cultural forms of expression) contains both meaning and form. In the context of Chinese lyric aesthetics, they became a comprehensive integrated expressive form, one is always in another. This series of experimental vocal and visual performances explore the integration, transformation, and the power of artistic forms in the context of Chinese lyric aesthetics, and is an attempt to disclose/reveal (with sonic-visual means) the formative rhythmic patterns that constitute deeply rooted traditions of Chinese cultural expression through the ‘dimensions’ of acoustics, imagery, and space woven into the artistic practices in the multi-layered stages of Hearing Rhythm, Seeing Rhythm.

Hearing Rhythm, Seeing Rhythm is a series of works dealing with the relationship between acoustics and imagery and particularly the idea of yijing (one of the essential aspects of Chinese lyric aesthetics) in contemporary integrated sonic-visual artistic practice. In this exhibition, the sound works start with the repeated singing of poetry, and the calligraphic drawings with ink and brush are a kind of improvisational rhythmic drawings of the accumulation of painted sonic gestures, presenting the process of drawing the sound patterns while listening to the vocal performance. The visual gestures, the movement, the passion become the graphic transcription of the sound. They are all different, layered together, as they were in the vocal performance. The repetition within the paintings recounts the repetition of the listening experience. The sonic‑visual space becomes a complex atmosphere of vocal and visual expressions. Together, the sonic patterns are revealed in the visuals, and the rhythmic flows heard in the paintings. As the scholar Su Shi (苏轼, 1037-1101) once advocated, “poetry in painting and painting in poetry.”

Link to an article and exposition: “Hearing Rhythm, Seeing Rhythm: A Research Approach to Reimagining Traditions of Chinese Poetic ‘rules of rhythm’” by Ling Liu in the Journal for Artistic Research.

Ling Liu is a sound and image based artist. Born and educated in Hangzhou, China, she completed a BFA and MFA in Chinese painting and Chinese art history. Additionally, she finished a MFA in photographic and electronic media. Currently she is a PhD candidate in practice based artistic research at Burren College of Art.

Even while painting for almost her entire life, she now explores sonic and visual media as essential for combining her passion to unravel the development of Chinese art and history as both a deep and intricate tradition and one that continuously reverberates in the contemporary world of expanded media.

Her works traverse media of any and all kinds; each bringing its own possibility, each its own necessity, each its own encounter with history. Her most recent work Hearing Rhythm, Seeing Rhythm investigates the relationship between acoustics and imagery, tradition and contemporary, adopting contemporary art forms as methods for the reclamation of history, as well as adapting the traditional aesthetics of modernity as they extend into the 21st century.