There are three different exhibitions and artworks we visit that day, the first one is The missing voice by Janet Cardiff. We have to follow the voice to find our direction, we view what she views and try to empathise with her feelings. From the research I realised:
The Missing Voice is Cardiff ’s first work for a large modern metropolis. It is a work for a city where everyone is a stranger – a city where people come to lose themselves, or find themselves; a place where people go missing every day.
The way Artangel develops projects is very open, so there was a bewildering range of possibilities for Cardiff to consider. Perhaps the most crucial issues were how and where the work would begin and end. Starting in the Crime section of the Whitechapel Library, The Missing Voice winds its way through the streets of Spitalfields and into the bustling spaces of the City of London. It ends, quite abruptly, leaving the listener alone amongst the crowd, in the public concourse of Liverpool Street Station. Large numbers of people rush by or wait. The listener is asked to head back to the library, this time without the companionship of the voice guiding his or her steps. The question of how to end her narratives is always a complex one for Cardiff, and the ending of The Missing Voice marks a particularly brave and open resolution.
Through my own experience I find it very interesting as the artwork is strongly connected with the audience, where the audience will have the urge to take action and experiment on their own. It begins from leading by the voice to observe the surroundings and find our own inside thoughts, it is a process from passive to active. By the end we were stopped inside of the Liverpool station and the voice started to change from the headphone to the radio speaker that played inside of the station. This is a very inspiring artwork where I gain much knowledge and see more possibilities that can be made for an artwork.
The second artwork is Whitechapel Gallery for Andrew Pierre Hart’s exhibition Bio-Data Flows and Other Rhythms – A Local Story. This is a pretty small exhibition where it has more paintings and two installation artworks. The backgrounds are: This new commission from London-based interdisciplinary artist and experimental music producer Andrew Pierre Hart draws on Whitechapel’s longstanding history as a home for migrant and diasporic communities and continues the artist’s interest in exploring connections between sound and painting. From the painting there are many abstract concepts involved, where it is the same with the sound, Sound also inflicts the abstract and undulating forms that feature in both the large mural and smaller paintings. Hart describes these works as capturing ‘the quotidian rhythm of Whitechapel… its vibrant rumble and dissonant past’. Personally I find it very powerful of how it has been presented, the dance connected very well with the sound itself.
The third one is my favourite one, Maria Than’s exhibition Homage To Quan Âm, it is a vietnam exhibition that is about how Maria has been keeped in the religion of Buddhism. There are many installation artworks and the sound play inside of the exhibition is music that usually plays in the tempo. My family is also part Buddhist, under my parents influence I also adopt some knowledge of Buddhism. My favourite work is the TV that records her life and it has been replied and replied. Homage To Quan Âm serves as a visual diary, narrating Maria’s personal journey of growing up – an account of staying with the trouble of becoming.
Facing external racism and discrimination, she denied her Vietnamese roots for a time, leading to a fractured sense of self. The body of work unfolds a narrative that mirrors the fragmented nature of identity formation through three states: refusal, symbolising the fear of isolation from early childhood; understanding, signifying the compassionate appreciation of family; and acceptance, representing the embracing of heritage. I personally like how she has exhibited her work, she has pulled the audience inside of her inner world, and l was deeply touched. And I would definitely like to try to learn from it for my future artworks.