Zhuyang Liu, Laosanyang, 2024. Courtesy the artist.
Shìshēng 势声: as unspoken sounds 不言之声 . Zhuyang Liu
Join us for a performance by artist Zhuyang Liu, featuring Lil Soap and Paul Cheneour, made in response to CCA’s current exhibition, Evelyn Taocheng Wang’s Being Poetic Ruins Life.
Over the course of the performance, a score is continuously read, spoken, translated, drawn, rewritten and performed. Sounds emerge from guzheng, flute, percussion and strange everyday objects. At other moments, symbols and drawings appear live, a hexagram is generated through the casting of coins, or an audience response becomes an action on a string. The performance moves between music, poetry, theatre, live art and collective reading, while remaining part of one continuous score.
Liu is a London-based Chinese transmedia artist, guzheng virtuoso, and composer working across installation, performance, sound, moving image, electronic media and writing. She works 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. Experiences of cultural multiplicity, migration, queerness and continual translation shape how Zhuyang approaches identities, languages and cultural forms as they move between places and contexts.
CREDITS
「Guà聲卦」Sound of Hexagram was originally developed by Laosanyang 老三样 (collective by Zhuyang Liu, Lil Soap and Bianco Li) in 2024. The original two score pages were written by Bianco Li, and the work is further rewritten and developed by Zhuyang Liu for this performance.
Performance
Zhuyang Liu — Guzheng, objects and live direction
Lil Soap — percussions
Paul Cheneour — flute
Chengbin Liu — live score writing operator
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BIOGRAPHY
Zhuyang has presented work internationally at the V&A, British Museum, Café OTO, IKLECTIK and JZ Jazz Club Hangzhou, with work held in the permanent collection of CAFA Art Museum, Beijing. Recipient of the Berenice Goodwin Prize for Achievement in Performance, they have collaborated with artists including Tim Hodgkinson, Maggie Nicols, John Edwards, Caroline Kraabel and Hiromichi Sakamoto. Their work has been featured in The Wire, It’s Nice That, SuperELLE, Beijing Daily and Music Weekly. In 2026, Zhuyang released an artist-made sound object that reimagines the album as a participatory listening and recording system, subsequently featured by It’s Nice That. Forthcoming projects include a presentation at MAO – Museum of Asian Art in Italy and a solo exhibition at Chilli Gallery.
www.zhuyuangliu.com
ig:liuzhuyangleiu
Lil Soap is a London-based multidisciplinary artist and performer working across Chinese opera, contemporary performance, sound and visual art. Trained in traditional Chinese opera, he explores gender, identity and physical expression through experimental performance. His practice combines theatrical movement, unconventional makeup and a playful approach to the body, challenging boundaries between tradition, contemporary art and queer expression.
Paul Cheneour trained at the Guildhall School of Music London under the late Professor Rainer Schuelein. He has 70 CDs published by Northstar music UK, 5 major films: including EMMA award winning ‘6th Happiness’ and ‘Hideous Kinky’. Best Foreign film winner in 2007 for ‘In The Place of the Dead’. DVDs & documentaries include BBC 2’s Egyptian Journeys, ‘The Painter and the Musician’ & Out-OF-Tune. In 2005 Paul was voted No: 72 in “The world’s best 100 jazz flautists of all time” by www.digitaldreamdoor.com readers. He is also a ‘Sound artist for Transmettre/Transmit in 2007 and founding member of: Zen Bicycle Band, Breath of Poets, Sufi-Baul-Fusion, ‘whereness’ Free-Range Orchestra, Dragonfly, Mo_Min_Ti & was Lossenham visiting artist ’21-’22. He led a China tour in 2025 with Zhuyang Liu.
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