This work is inspired by Hsu Yen-ting’s experience of a short residency in Chong-Ching, a city in China. Like many rapidly developing cities, Chong-Ching especially has most rebuilding buildings in the world, because Chinese government urges to upgrade this city as ‘the first grade city’ such as Shanghai or Beijing. Local people are almost unable to find a trace of their childhood. It’s not only about rise and fall of a city or cities, but in this modern society, especially with the internet world, from outer to inner world, hardware to software, everything could change extremely fast.
And interestingly, in many cases, we hardly notice things always exist in our daily lives, whatever people, events or objects…ect. We tend to ignore what is always there until it’s disappearing. We start to notice it, we want it back, we miss it. When people in Chong-Ching know that some old places are going to be demolished, they start to get nervous and want to preserve them. It happens in Taiwan and everywhere too. Not only cities, but also in many other cases of our lives. So, what is the existence? What is the disappearance? Which one is real or void? Sometimes the disappearance is more real than the existence, and very often, we don’t have any power or chance to change facts, but since we start to notice those facts, we can believe the energy is still running somewhere. It’s also proved in physics.
In collaboration with Kappa Tseng, based on law of conservation of energy, we experimented on sharing energy with fans, objects, and sounds. All the energy from various objects and sounds could affect each others in different ways. The content of sounds was from those objects, fans, electronic sounds and some disappearing sounds of Taiwan, ranging from traditional cultures to animals.