Sound Meridians—Cultural Counter-mapping through Sound
Online Exhibition Project

Initiated by TheCube Project Space, the project Sound Meridians— Cultural Counter-mapping through Sound invites curators/artists from four Asian regions to organize disparate yet echoing exhibitions by treating Southeast Asian cultural context as their shared text and featuring the sound cultures and creations in their respective countries with commissioned artworks, archives from field survey, audio recordings, videos, and historical documents.

Sound Meridians, the title of this project, owes its inspiration to the concept in traditional Chinese medicine, claiming that human life is sustained by the energy circulating around the meridian system in the human body. In Western anatomy, there is no convincing evidence of meridians, yet there has been empirical verification in the practice of Chinese medicine. This project invokes such a view of corporeality as an imagery metaphor, investigating how sound can communicate different local cultures, put them into circulation, and even transform them into dynamic public spaces, and how sound culture per se can become the medium and material for the topology of history that responds to the historico-cultural development endemic to a place.

The first phase of Sound Meridian is divided into four parts. The section of Taiwan features the song Rainy Night Flowers and the Evolution of Sound Machines in Taiwan curated by Jeph Lo. It examines the development of modern sound media in Taiwan under the influence of the innovative regime of technology, regulations, and culture, so as to outline the evolutionary process of sound machines that serve as the means for modern people’s hearing experiences. The section of the Philippines invites scholar Dayang Yraola to present her project Taginting, A Resonant Community of Sound Practice which illustrates the studies on the history of modern experimental sound in the Philippines with detailed audiovisual archival documents. The section of Singapore is Melantun Records Pop-up: Electronic Dreams of Tsao Chieh curated by musician Chee-Wai Yuan. Artist Ujikaji is invited to represent his work Melantun Records that introduces the oeuvre by electronic musician Tsao Chieh who’s been consigned to oblivion. The section of Malaysia is Silver Noise: Sound Circuits of Peninsula Malaysia in Parts, on Exile curated by artist Sow-Yee Au, showcasing the emergence, rheology, and different versions of Malaysian national anthem.