Wang Jing | 2023 Residency
Switzerland | Sound Art
2023 — Sound Art
Nationality: China
Residency location: Digital
Based in Hangzhou, China. Jing-Adel Wang is a sound studies scholar, art anthropologist, curator and practitioner in sound art. She holds a Ph.D. in Interdisciplinary Arts and a MA in Communication Studies both from Ohio University (U.S.). She was a visiting professor at MIT anthropology, a visiting scholar at the School of Creative Media at the City University of Hong Kong. She is currently an associate professor of sound studies at Zhejiang University. She is also the founder of the Sound Lab at College of Media and International Culture at Zhejiang University.
Academically, she is the author of the book Half Sound, Half Philosophy: Aesthetics, Politics, and History of China’s Sound Art, Sound and Affect: an anthropology of China’s sound practice. She has published articles that explore the field of sound, music and culture in academic journals including Social Science Research, Leonardo, Leonardo Music Journal, Journal of Popular Music Studies, and Organised Sound, Representations.
Artistically, she works with field recordings, voice and installation-based performance. She has performed as the sound dramaturgy in the experimental theater Heaven Downwards at Power Station of Art, Shanghai. Her artistic works take the form of installation and live performances in museums and music venues.
Recently, she has been fascinated with the phenomenon and practice of sound and listening in tacit reading and praying. Specifically, she asks, how do different atmospheric environments affect the acoustic architecture within and without? How to materialize the voice or the acoustic architecture within? Will the practice of voice within be an effective way to counter self-exhaustion, to regain our life vitality, and to restore a healthy and caring relationship with the world?
During this residency, she proposes a project titled “Ears in the Wind.” She hopes to extend and expand a previous performance “Voices Within” to further explore the technique of praying, space and spirituality, resonance and gathering. She intends to create a performance, writing and an audio art piece. She will conduct extensive archival work and fieldwork to look for objects used in praying and objects that assist tacit reading. She will also collect poems and stories about praying and tacit reading in different cultures and places. For the audio art piece, she intends to combine her reading of the creative writing with recordings of her live performances. It can be realized as a sound installation using a radio set or a piece of soundtrack to be accessed online.
