Yanqi Chen & Wonchul Ryu
Cassette Tapes and Live electronics
In the installation, Ryu arranges bamboo, food containers, cable ties, and fragments of translation into layered configurations that suggest adaptation, binding, and distortion. The assemblages echo the spliced sounds: both operate through interruption and reconfiguration. Within this shared rhythm of fracture and repair, the work opens a space where differentiation is not a boundary but a method — a living process of resonance between materials, bodies, and cultures.
The sound part from Yanqi, on the other hand, blurs the temporal boundary between past and present. Yanqi collected field recordings from travels, daily radio broadcasts, and old songs in the artists’ mother language, then wove them together with cassette tapes from the 1980s belonging to strangers. Performed live on two vintage cassette players, these sonic fragments form a layered collage that unsettles linear time and stable identities, creating an acoustic space in which cultural traces and temporal fragments intertwine, resonate, and take on new forms.
