Listening to Yongxing | Community Sound Project, Chiayi

During the residency, Jez Fang worked with older community members through listening, storytelling, vocal interaction and collective improvisation. These encounters offered a way of approaching the village through the experiences of those who live there and became an important context for the subsequent field recordings and sound composition.

The project does not claim to represent the entire community or determine how Yongxing should be heard. Instead, it presents the artist’s response to the place, shaped through fieldwork, exchange and sustained listening.

A village house with red New Year couplets and a rice-drying mat leaning by the door, beneath a hillside of tall, slender areca palms.

Sounds of Memory

The workshops began with the voices and lived experiences of older residents. Participants shared memories of everyday life, labour and environmental change, reflecting on their relationships with the surrounding landscape.

A smiling woman in a pink cap and striped top sits behind a wooden tea table with a teapot, pitcher and cups, an air conditioner and framed picture on the wall behind her.

A smiling older man in a grey-blue shirt leans on the side of a truck bed, with rows of tea bushes and bamboo groves behind him.

The project attended not only to the content of their stories, but also to accents, rhythms, pauses and breath. These details, which cannot be fully preserved through written documentation, allowed memory to emerge as an embodied and acoustic experience.

A woman in a wide-brimmed sun hat holds a large armful of leafy herbs on a hillside road among areca palms and misty mountains.

A man looks over the side of a dark pickup truck on a concrete yard, with areca-covered mountains and cloudy sky behind.

Five villagers sit around a round table with dishes at home, two of them smiling at the camera, with a wooden cabinet and shelves of jars behind.

Five workers pose beside a small truck loaded with areca fronds in a green grove, in rubber boots, one holding a bucket hat.

Workshop Process

The workshops used vocal interaction, expressive sound and improvisation to guide participants from simple breathing, vocal imitation and call-and-response exercises towards an exploration of rhythm, emotion, volume and sonic tension.

Two people crouch and strike split bamboo tubes with thin sticks in a school hall, while others sit and watch behind them.

Residents in red shirts and other clothes sit in a wide circle in a community room with eyes closed and hands on their knees, a microphone on a stool at the centre and a red banner behind.

No previous experience in singing or performance was required. Through relaxed and playful interaction, participants were encouraged to let go of judgements about whether a sound was correct or pleasing. Laughter and mutual response gradually opened individual voices, eventually developing into collective improvised sound performances.

As individual sounds became part of a shared expression, participants began not only to make sound, but also to listen to one another, sense the surrounding space and adjust their relationship with the environment. Sound became a means of embodied expression and communication, allowing participants to enter the shared acoustic space with greater openness.

Residents sit on folding chairs in a circle among tea plants, with a person standing at a small table with a laptop in the centre and forest behind.

Residents sit on chairs among rows of tea bushes in mist, wearing headphones, one man in a red shirt in the foreground with his hands together.

Echoes of the Land

Jez Fang conducted field recordings throughout Yongxing Village and the surrounding landscape of Fanlu Township, including Zhanghu Creek, nearby streams and waterfalls, tea plantations, betel palm forests and sites of everyday activity.

A field recorder in its bag with a windshielded microphone sits on a concrete path facing a still green pool ringed by dense forest and areca palms.

A small waterfall drops into a deep green pool among mossy boulders and steep, fern-covered rock walls.

The recordings do not attempt to create a complete acoustic inventory of the area. They approach the relationships between land, ecology, agriculture and everyday life from the artist’s listening position.

Two windshielded microphones on a stereo bar and tripod stand on a mossy track between tall, straight cedar trees.

A person in blue holds a long microphone boom pole up toward areca palms, while another person reaches up beside a palm trunk and a villager crouches near a blue truck.

The movement of water across terrain, the acoustic effects of cultivation and the presence of human activity within local ecological rhythms all became part of the work. Through listening, the landscape emerged not as a passive background, but as an environment continually shaped by natural processes and human presence.

A small van on a forest track between very tall areca palms, with a person in a red top seated on its roof.

One hand in a worn work glove and one bare hand hold an areca nut cut in half, showing its pale interior.

A round blue sorting machine with numbered chutes and hoses leading into large sacks of areca nuts, with handwritten paper slips on top and small microphones attached to its side.

A woman in a pink hat and red apron bends over a heap of areca stems in a workshop full of baskets, cutting nuts free.

From Fieldwork to Exhibition

Field recordings, residents’ voices and materials gathered during the workshops were selected, edited and mixed by Jez Fang into sound and moving-image works.

The works were presented from 18 to 24 January 2025 at Ammunition Depot H14 in Fanlu Township as part of the Chiayi Asayama Wild Art Action exhibition.

Inside a former ammunition depot with timber roof trusses, a large white banner for the Chiayi Asayama Wild Art Action hangs above a circular arrangement of fruit, vegetables and plants on the floor, with visitors and hanging textile works along the walls.

Five colourful posters for the Chiayi Asayama Wild Art Action exhibition pasted in a row on a weathered brick wall.

The exhibition brought the sounds of Zhanghu Creek, agricultural landscapes and local residents into a former military space. Rather than presenting a fixed or comprehensive portrait of Yongxing, it offered a situated interpretation formed through residency, community encounters and environmental listening.

Four participants sit with eyes closed on a grassy field wearing headphones, with a light-coloured dog beside them and a concrete wall behind.

Participants in headphones sit on folding chairs and lie on the grass of an open field, listening with eyes closed, with trees and slender kinetic sculptures behind.

Sounds of Memory

Workshop Process

Echoes of the Land

From Fieldwork to Exhibition

Listen

Credits