Lin Chi-Wei: Revolving Binary Forces

Hanart TZ Gallery presents “Revolving Binary Forces“, Lin Chi-Wei’s first major solo exhibition in Hong Kong. Lin Chi-Wei is one of Taiwan’s most important multi-disciplinary artists, a pioneer of sound art, and one of the most acclaimed new media artists internationally.

In 1992, Lin Chi-Wei, along with Singing Liu and Steve Chan (and later Po-Li Liu) formed the “Zero and Sound Liberation Organization (Z.S.L.O)”, widely seen as Taiwan’s first noise group. A year later they released Taiwan’s first self-published CD. They were also featured in Noise magazine, an important underground publication focused on noise and industrial music, which brought awareness of their work to an international audience.

At a time when art as an intervention was not yet recognized in Taiwan’s daily lingo, Zero and Sound’s performances were seen as outrageous attention-seeking spectacles, even though the performances demonstrated their skillful application of noise’s anti-music properties as a means of deconstructing the mainstream cultural system.

Over the next two years, they and a group of friends held the annual “Taipei Ragged Living Festival” which pushed Taipei’s underground culture to unprecedented heights. Their performance projects encompassed a variety of avant garde modes, including installation art, experimental architecture, industrial noise, S/M and experimental film.

In one of the most notorious acts of Taiwan’s live performance art, during the Taipei Ragged Living Festival, Zero and Sound performed an enema on themselves onstage, and then sprayed the dirty water over the audience without warning. This last event culminated in a series of riots, which forced the termination of the festival.

On the opening night of the exhibition at Hanart TZ Gallery, Lin Chi-Wei will present his renowned Tape Music, a live, interactive sound performance, involving a 204m-long tape embroidered with phonetic characters (Tape Music, Score for MUSARC). As the audience passes the tape through their hands in a spiral formation, each member speaks or sings out the phonetic sound on the section of the tape in front of him or her. The result is a continuous, organic and unpredictable soundscape. This is the first time Lin Chi-Wei will perform this work in Hong Kong.