Shìshēng 势声: as unspoken sounds 不言之声
. Zhuyang Liu

Join us for a performance by artist Zhuyang Liu, featuring Lil Soap and Paul Cheneour, made in response to CCA’s current exhibition, Evelyn Taocheng Wang’s Being Poetic Ruins Life.

Over the course of the performance, a score is continuously read, spoken, translated, drawn, rewritten and performed. Sounds emerge from guzheng, flute, percussion and strange everyday objects. At other moments, symbols and drawings appear live, a hexagram is generated through the casting of coins, or an audience response becomes an action on a string. The performance moves between music, poetry, theatre, live art and collective reading, while remaining part of one continuous score.

Liu is a London-based Chinese transmedia artist, guzheng virtuoso, and composer working across installation, performance, sound, moving image, electronic media and writing. She works across a wider family of Asian zithers and plucked strings, including sanxian, duxianqin, xuanqin and koto, engaging these traditions as living forms of embodied and cultural knowledge. These instrumental practices are brought into dialogue with free improvisation, electronics, voice, found objects and spatial sound, while rethinking contemporary relationships between traditional Chinese instruments, language and cultural expression. Experiences of cultural multiplicity, migration, queerness and continual translation shape how Zhuyang approaches identities, languages and cultural forms as they move between places and contexts.