Kwan Sheung Chi, Tao Hui, Ho Tzu Nyen

Tao Hui Simon Liu Ho Tzu Nyen Ellen Pau Kwan Sheung Chi

Kiang Malingue is pleased to present in its New York space Interstice: Whirled Music, an exhibition of video works by five artists who employ the manipulation of sound and music as a strategy, in tandem with the rhythms of bodily and camera movements, to probe social and political flux and tension.

Interstice is a new occasional series, situated in between longer-form exhibitions. Extending the gallery’s ongoing commitment to moving image practices, and drawing from the framework of the interstitial, the works in the exhibition nestle within in-between spaces of the built and social environments, enact a breach in the unconscious spiral, and unravel the unseen and the unspoken. A “mishearing” of the “world music” genre, Whirled Music also embodies sonic interference as a tool that challenges notions of othering. By bringing these works together, they form a sonic composition, unique to each viewer as they enter the gallery, guided by sound, moving between one work to another.

Works in the exhibition include:

Ellen Pau, Recycling Cinema, 2000, 8 min 37 sec Ho Tzu Nyen, Gould, 2009 to 2013, 1 mins 48 sec Simon Liu, Refuse Room, 2024, 10 min Tao Hui, Being Wild, 2021, 12 min 3 sec Kwan Sheung Chi, One Million (United States dollar), 2025, 60 min 22 sec

Intro:

Ellen Pau, Recycling Cinema, 2000, 8 min 37 sec

A horizontal splitscreen: the unbound currents of water hovers above the linearity of an expressway in Hong Kong. The whirring and overlapping sounds of waves and traffic are intercepted by the errant camera following the directions of the two-way traffic. Moving from night to day, the camera returns, ending with the forward-backward motion in the lyrics, “love is real, real is love”, from John Lennon's 1970 song “Love.”

Verse:

Ho Tzu Nyen, Gould, 2009 to 2013, 1 mins 48 sec

The rhythmic nods of a pianist’s head, a stand-in for musician Glenn Gould, known for his physical embodiment and idiosyncratic interpretation of classics, vigorously mimes his performance. The editing and jumpcuts accelerate in tandem with the composition’s rousing progression. A white gloved hand emerges, guiding the head’s movement, as the head appears to wrest control by pushing back. Ho Tzu Nyen unmasks the tension, performance, and optics between power and resistance, between virtuosity and ventriloquy, and the mechanisms of control and surveillance.

Chorus:

Simon Liu, Refuse Room, 2024, 10 min

Location: Hong Kong. An ominous peer over a telecom antenna suspended hundreds of feet above street level sets off a frenetic vortex that courses through the city’s infrastructure and textures, fragments and shadows. Treading in the contradiction of the familiar strange, the film is a makeshift memorial of detritus, and a witness to ephemerality and the enduring. The haunting audio samples and sonic distortions propel a hallucinatory energy of this action film par excellence, that "oscillates from moments of togetherness to disappearance, rising and falling, dwelling and fleeing, regret and acceptance.”

Bridge:

Tao Hui, Being Wild, 2021, 12 min 3 sec

A young woman rollerskates across various sites in Guangzhou that emblematize China's contemporary development: the CBD (Central Business District), a film studio, an urban village, and an abandoned paper mill, locations that often appear in film and television series. She sings a capella 1980s songs by Tai Zhao-Mei and Wang Hai-Ling, singers of the Taiwanese Campus Folk movement, popular music in the mid-1970s to the early 1990s with idealistic lyrics, characterized as decadent music amidst ongoing tension between Taiwan and China. Filmed during the Covid-19 pandemic in 2021, this erstwhile yearning of escape and progress echoes a reflection towards, perhaps, as in a lyric, “a path meandering through the rubble”, of past and future.

Coda:

Kwan Sheung Chi, One Million (United States dollar), 2025, 60 min 22 sec

The rapid shuffling sound of banknotes being counted by hand turns the human action into a hypnotic, mechanical beat. Through a looped video segment, a thin stack of 100 U.S. dollar bills never ceases to deplete, until the total value reaches one million. In this ongoing series, the duration of each video is predicated on the currency’s value, thus pointing to global economic inequities, while serving as a distress signal on the illusion of wealth and the machine of inexhaustible capitalism.