Artists
Photo Credit: NIU Chun-Chiang
LIU Pei-Wen
LIU Pei-Wen
| Location | France / Paris |
|---|---|
| Residency | Cité Internationale des Arts |
| Year of the Grant | 2006 |
| Personal Website | LIU Pei-Wen's Personal Website |
Artist Statement:
I have dabbled in a variety of digital domains, but have since concentrated on sound art, acousmatic, and streaming video art from 1999. My work has been influenced by neo-dada, freeform jazz, as well as avant-garde electronic musicians and minimalist painters/composers. I have composed pieces for radio, animation, dance, and theatre projects. As a sound artist, I have been recording those soundings of nature phenomenons and human activities, or an emerging moment of small talk. Slowly, I built a personal archive of sonic observations, with intentions or without. I often perform improvisationally using field recording as seeds for acousmatic composition, and realising sound installation as experiments to materialise the immateriality.
Utilizing sound as the source material has the nature of fragility in several dimensions. It could easily be manipulated by the microphone's movement that of a recording artist driving by, or driving towards; thereby lies the origin of the sounding source in time. Sounders accompany the moment and environment sounds that are formed. Sometimes, I let those sounds passing through the recording device for its pure utterance, as the microphone does not retreat and then reveals the true beauty of soundscape. Since a moment of true silence rarely exists, my experiences have taught me to listen to the hidden surroundings carefully, to listen beyond the sounds and its artefacts, often resulting in the weaving kinetic nuances of acoustic expression. Composing and, at the same time, interacting with sounds is such a multi-dimensional rediscovery. Often, a challenging motif is to consider if the recorder is already one of the parameters of this particular moment of recording.
The experience of living at Cite' Internationale des Arts, Paris, was very positive for my artistic development. Paris is a busy junction, particularly in new music, computer, and electronic driven forms of musical performativities, as well as the rich culture of world music and art, for both authentic and experimental music are very much present. For almost a year, I spent most of my energy and fellowship on listening, observing all kinds/genres of concert and performance, and had exchanged many discussions with a great number of artistic minds and souls. These experiences opened up, at the same time challenged, the conventional norm of ‘art-making’ for me. Since then, I have been much more attentive to my role as an artist in the society, and could rethink how sound art interlinks the perception of the community's awareness; of the acoustic dimension in public and private sphere, of their aesthetic and functional appearances and interpretations. In other words, the counterbalance of how sounds travel between the divisions and across our publicly formed spaces for private memories. This is the collective soundscape.