A Taiwan artist is joining 15 other artists in the first-ever exhibition of sound as an art medium at New York's Museum of Modern Art (MoMA).

"I think using sound as a medium or material to produce art provides a different kind of possibility of speculation and imagination," said Hong-Kai Wang, whose work will be featured in Soundings: A Contemporary Score. "Sound is not visual. Sound is very conceptual, very empirical, and it can be very abstract depending on how you approach sound."

The exhibit will run Aug 10-Nov 3 in three MoMA locations: the Special Exhibitions Gallery, the Bauhaus staircase and the Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Sculpture Garden. The other artists are from the US, Uruguay, Norway, Denmark, England, Scotland, Germany, Australia and Japan.

Sound art is a relatively undefined territory. The works MoMA will showcase range from immersive tuned environments to sound-emitting objects to conceptual schematics on paper.

The art installations include architectural interventions, visualizations of otherwise inaudible sound, an exploration of how sound ricochets within a gallery, and a range of field recordings of everything from bats and abandoned buildings in Chernobyl to 59 bells in New York and Wang's factory project in Taiwan.

"It means a lot to me that this piece is going to be shown in New York because this is the place where I established my creative identity," said Wang, who moved to New York in 1998 and remained in the city until two years ago. Wang said she is now a nomad who spends a lot of time in Taipei, Taiwan.

"My interest in sound really stems from the social alienation I experienced as a foreigner when I first moved to New York," she said. "Whether with language, sound, noise or silence, I think my motivation is just to explore how we relate to one another and how we understand one another through sound."

Wang's factory project, Music While We Work, was originally featured at the 54th Venice Biennale in Italy in 2011. The work was part of The Heard and the Unheard - Soundscape Taiwan exhibit in the Taiwan Pavilion.

The project brought together a group of retired workers from a century-old sugar refinery in the artist's native Huwei, a small town in central west Taiwan.

Wang and her collaborator, Chen Bo-Wei, led a series of recording workshops for the retirees and their spouses. They then returned to the factory, where Wang asked them to paint a world composed by their listening.

The final video installation documents both the collective learning process and the factory workers' resulting compositions.

"Before this project, I was mostly making field audio recordings," Wang said. "Then I found myself growing more interested in the idea of how we live together and how listening can be shared."

Wang said looking at a painting in a museum is a more static experience than using sound as a tool for artistic expression, which she believes can afford the listener new access to life and history.

carolineberg@chinadailyusa.com

(China Daily USA 08/08/2013 page2)