Errant ListeningSounding Spaces: Documenting Sound Practice in Chinese Mainland and Hong Kong Since the 1990s Edward Sanderson and Zhongwei (Mabu) Li

Exhibition view of It Always Sounds Somewhere: Sounding Sound Practice in Chinese Mainland and Hong Kong Since the 1990s, Inside-Out Art Museum, Beijing. Courtesy of Inside-Out Art Museum.

Errant Listening is an experimental, open-ended programme series that attends to the sonic dimensions of contemporary artistic practice, documentation, and curation. The series explores how sound wanders, unsettles, and exceeds the structures that seek to contain it. By focusing on the un/archivable – the sounds and vibrations that slip away, withdraw, or refuse legibility – and foregrounding the sonic agency embedded within these activities and gatherings, the series proposes ways of understanding the archive not as preservation, but as attunement, and listening not as perception, but as transformation.

In this presentation, Dr Edward Sanderson will share insights from more than a decade of research and fieldwork on sound art and experimental music in Chinese Mainland and Hong Kong since the 1990s. They will discuss recent focus of their work, including the recent exhibition at the Inside-Out Art Museum in Beijing, as well as the physical sound archive they are developing in Hong Kong. Drawing on extensive research, long-term observation, and their experience organising events across the region, Sanderson will examine the relationship between sound and space and its social significance, offering a distinctive sonic lens through which to understand the evolving landscape of sound art and alternative spaces in China and its neighbouring contexts.

The presentation will be followed by an in-person conversation between Sanderson and Dr Zhongwei (Mabu) Li, whose PhD research focused on music, subcultures, and informal modes of cultural consumption and circulation in 1990s China. Li’s current work examines the ruptures and continuities shaped by shifts in media formats over the past thirty years and the cultural ecosystems these formats generate.

Free entry, register here

Access Information

This event takes place on the ground floor with step-free access in our multi-purpose programme space, with a fully accessible, all-gender bathroom.

Please feel free to inquire with info@asymmetryart.org if you would like to discuss any access needs. Please kindly be advised that requests should be made one week in advance of the event, and we will try our best to make accommodations subject to availability.