Join us for a performance by artist Zhuyang Liu, made in response to CCA’s current exhibition Evelyn Taocheng Wang’s Being Poetic Ruins Life. Liu is a London-based Chinese transmedia artist, guzheng virtuoso and composer working across installation, performance, sound, moving image, electronic media and writing.

They work across a wider family of Asian zithers and plucked strings, including sanxian, duxianqin, xuanqin and koto, engaging these traditions as living forms of embodied and cultural knowledge. These instrumental practices are brought into dialogue with free improvisation, electronics, voice, found objects and spatial sound, while rethinking contemporary relationships between traditional Chinese instruments, language and cultural expression.

The body forms a foundation of Zhuyang’s long-term research: a physical and political infrastructure through which power, labour, care, surveillance, emotion and technology are absorbed and negotiated. Sound moves between the intimate and the collective, the sensory and the institutional, operating simultaneously as material, information, environment and force.

Experiences of cultural multiplicity, migration, queerness and continual translation intersect with these questions, shaping how Zhuyang approaches identities, languages and cultural forms as they move between places and contexts. Misalignment, misunderstanding and mistranslation become generative conditions for new forms of encounter and communication, with the artwork itself operating as an open language through which different experiences and cultural references can meet and mutate.

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