Lucia H Chung
Lucia H Chung (AKA ‘En Creux’) is a Taiwanese experimental audio artist based in London. Lucia began her talk by presenting a visual piece called ‘Tell me a story’, she describes the work as a reaction to the culture shock of moving to the UK. She was working with a small group of MA students in Winchester, Lucia was the only non-english speaker and as a result was quite shy and reserved. Lucia was interested in the ‘gap’ between translations, and how a person can get caught in that gap. Lucia would whisper something in mandarin to her partner, and the partner would whisper some English phrases back. This process was filmed with a two channel video set up, the absence of understanding was expressed clearly in their faces. During this time at Winchester, Lucia was primarily working with video to explore themes of communication, and the differences in personality when speaking different languages. She conducted a visual investigation on herself, filming herself speaking English, and then speaking Mandarin.
After these works Lucia started working more with sound in video. The piece Lucia showed was a film of her doing a full body prostration, a buddhist ritual that is repeated 108 times as a way of offering yourself or to repent. She was interested in the psychological transition from the first action to the 108th repetition, an ‘untranslatable mind space through a very physical repetition’. Lucia didn’t perform 108 repetitions, instead she edited the video to invoke the psychological mind space. She sped up and slowed down the footage, emphasising the frequency change in the audio.
Continuing her investigation into translation, Lucia found a researcher called Sarat Maharaj. She quotes an article by the South African man,
‘There emerged, it seems to me, a notion of translation which activates both the visual and the sonic. Beyond the sense of the word and image are sounds which cannot be entirely drawn into the net of signification, and cannot be entirely decoded or deciphered as meaning this, that or the other. This larger sonic pause, the penumbra of the untranslatable that shadow and smudge language, and for which we have to venture beyond language.’
This quote gave Lucia the confidence to ditch visuals and focus on sound as a material medium. Lucia started her PHD at Goldsmiths, she was trying to understand what sound arts is. Lucia discovered Jacob Kirkegaard, a sound artist who had an interest in space. Lucia specifically talks about his piece ‘4 Rooms’, an art piece in which Jacob went to the zone of isolation in Chernobyl. He then recorded the ambient sound of 4 public spaces, he choses these spaces because of the public traffic they once hosted. The recording were then played into the room and rerecorded, repeating this process 10 times for each room, a technique pioneered by Alvin Lucier. Lucia appreciate the hidden dimension of the space Jacob was revealing, she equated this to her investigation in translation.
Next Lucia presented a piece she created in 2009 called ‘Spring Piece’, an audio piece created at a time of transition for her. She had just moved to London, specifically New Cross, she recalled it as a horrible place with rats and an inordinate amount of noise created mainly by passing buses. She described how her room would shake when the busses drove past, which would happen very frequently. This was a stark contrast to the quant medieval town of Winchester. She recorded the sound of her room, and used a piezo microphone to play the recording through the single glazed Windows pane, then rerecording this. This was Lucia’s first sound piece.
Lucia takes a lot of inspiration from sculpture, and says she felt a lot more comfortable using sculpture as a medium. Although she was working with sound, she still hadn’t found a way to equate it to working with a physical medium. She then recalls the breakthrough moment when she made that connection. Lucia recalls seeing Whiteread’s piece ‘Ghost’, a casting of the inside of a living room. Its a piece displaying negative space, a casting and documentation of a living space. Lucia compares this to Alvin Lucier’s ‘Im sitting in a room’, equating the plaster in the casting of the room with Lucier’s mapping of the room with sound as a catalyst.