Gardening of the Ruins
I collaborated with my friend and colleague Zhen Zhen Zhong on her multi-media installation, Gardening of The Ruins. "The building of this garden is an embodiment of the alternative approach seeking. It plays into all expectations of what gardens should be——quiet, secluded, and beautiful places to heal both body and mind. But it is also violent at the same time as there is no natural and real element in it. Land, water, farming tools, human bodies, movements, architecture, and oceans are rebuilding by using artificial materials. While it could be a place where we shelter from the world’s brutal reality".
I was asked to emulate sounds of labor and farm work for the music. Interlaced with the scraping, stirring, and turning of the animatronics, my piece lives and breathes within the installation through three small amplifiers placed in the "water" section. The goal for the water section was to find a medium between tool sounds and ambience that evokes a contrast between the environment and the labor. Once the amplifiers begin playing, the viewer is brought to the intricate sounds and details of the space.