A Double Listen - A sound-based exhibition and its eponymous site-specific performance

Toolbox Percussion is delighted to present a sound-based exhibition “A Double Listen”. The exhibition and its eponymous performances will open to the public on 19 June 2021 at 17/F, H Queen's, running through to 8 July 2021. “A Double Listen”, serving as a dossier, features many of the past and new aesthetic attempts of Toolbox Percussion. The exhibition is title sponsored by H Queen’s and HART.

The mechanisms of creating percussive sound are so versatile that musicians or composers are far from fully exploring them. This exhibition encapsulates our work in the form of the multimedia conflation of percussive sound and visualized installation, multi-channel audio work, and newly commissioned sound sequences.

The exhibition is Toolbox Percussion’s venture into interdisciplinary practices, featuring sound artist and composer Alain Chiu’s new sound art installation where different objects and sounds are fragmentedly laid out in a finite space, leading audience to construct a sound afterimage, and unique listening experience.

Installation work Round by composer Fung Lam delves into the playfulness of percussive arts. The mahjong playing piece depicts different ways of playing mahjong as the sole instrument of the piece, injecting traits of quotidian pastime into percussion. While a series of spatial performances (as well as site-specific auditory experience) will feature Fung Lam's room-filling compositional sequences.

Positioned as music happenings in a gallery space, these performances will also feature works by Steve Reich, John Cage, and Samson Young.

But' it’s been a long long while

There are two ways of walking into an old house. One, you get in and look for emotions, search through the past. Flip through stories. Rummaging through anecdotes. Leave no stone unturned. Formulating an arch of progression that converges onto now. And then you encounter Zeno of Elea, with each subdivision of states becoming increasingly small and stories becoming increasingly complex. It is difficult to circumvent the weight of the past. 

The second way is when one leaves those stories, memories, anecdotes be. Touch no things. These anecdotes and emotions still exist but in a somewhat hallucinatory state. Stories from different times and spaces form a continuum; sometimes, these anecdotes appear haphazardly and then linger on for seconds, minutes, or days. (It’s ok to dwell on) The house is merely a space that contains and confines, has no other functions other than warding off rain and the wind.

I imagine the past as monoliths of sound, but they are not immobile nor fixated in time and has no arch of progression, mainly serves as Furniture Music or, by happenstance, forms something monumental counterpointing the vista out of the glass facade overlooking Central’s main streets and fleeting images from a foreign place. 

🔻 Exhibition 19/6 - 8/7 (Mon-Fri 13:00-21:00; Sat, Sun & Public holiday 11:00-21:00)

Cantonese Guided Tour (Everyday 15:00; 17:00; 19:30)* 
English Guided Tour (Every Sat, Sun & Public holidays 14:00)*

Free
*Online registration, limited registration available on-site

🔻 Site-specific Performance 19,20,27/6 (18:00 & 20:00) Six Performances

$200