Portfolio WEEK6 Mengting Zhuo #Ins Element1

Zhuo Mengting (b. Guangzhou, China, 1990) makes circumstances with site, sound, body and time, in the types of execution, participatory establishment, and shows. Frequently moderate, inconspicuous and cozy, her work welcomes the crowd to examine subjects of association, transmission, possibility and distance. Sonically, she is investigating the governmental issues of tuning in – the creation, gathering and control of signs – as well as the liminal points where sound and space converge, through a progression of happenings prevalently utilizing non-instruments, undesirable clamor, tracked down objects and the body. Late scores were created for MAO Torino, Italy, Frieze London, and Bistro OTO London, UK.

Zhuo Mengting also has active practice in breaking traditional narratives. Her master’s work “Thesaurus” is an attempt at random text collage. Before each performance, she would take out a stack of printed paper. Each piece of paper had a phrase or a word. This set of pre-printed words usually had a certain theme, such as “feminism.” During the performance, she blindfolded herself, scrambled the order of the papers, and showed them to the audience one by one. The audience could assemble and interpret the meaning on their own. As the original author, she completely lost the right to interpret.

In her lecture, we were exploring sounds through clapping hands in the space with blind eyes. It let me think of the work “I am sitting in a room.”The piece features Lucier recording himself narrating a text, and then playing the tape recording back into the room, re-recording it. The new recording is then played back and re-recorded, and this process is repeated. Due to the room’s particular size and geometry, certain frequencies of the recording are emphasized while others are attenuated. Eventually the words become unintelligible, replaced by the characteristic resonant frequencies of the room itself. It might be a little bit out of topic to compare her ideas on my portfolio work but it would still be a honourable mention:

In her work ‘There is no stasis’, she continues exploration with the concept of emptiness, resonance, chance and the threshold between sites and bodies. The activated architecture reveals different states, sounds and moods whilst the visitors become part of the energy field of the space, enhancing or absorbing the resonating frequencies generated by a microphone-speaker feedback loop in an oval room. In my portfolio1, the last emperor, I am exploring sounds with ‘opening the door’ with different materials in the final performance mode. I will pay attention to the resonance and feedback through different materials like aluminium paper, rubber, wood, and velvet… It would be nice to shift from a real door from the first…