Ftarri / Ftarri Doubtmusic Festival

Yuen Chee Wai

Yuen Chee Wai's work explores how image, sound, and text can occur spontaneously as symbiotic mental productions. Informed by philosophical interests, his explorations with noise are process-oriented in the sense that they sculpt both personal and public experiential terrains. He is known for his drone/ambient/field recording approaches and live performances, and the photographic elements in his installations reflect also on the theme of sound and silence as a visual lens. In encountering a surrounding soundscape, its objects and architecture, imprints of images recur on the mind's eye, almost as if in stasis. Visual/verbal patterns or perimeters, their time sequences and frequencies, become collapsible around memory and even the very attempt to recall a lost, unnamed, undeterminable subject. This thematic element of speech and silence is often communicated through the conceptual structure and time-based orientation of his performances, where sound as medium offers up a shifting vacancy, a fleeting space of invisibility in which images, along with resistive moments of distortion and clarity, dense signals, and thinning messages clash and collide--then quiet down, decay, and are gone.


Last updated: August 20, 2010

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