This is no country music

This is no country music took the form of a performative lecture/collective listening session, around the work of Taiwanese vocalist and composer Koh Bunya, particularly his Earthquake Relief Song. Born in 1910, Bunya’s practice developed between China and Japan. Having been born in Taiwan under Japanese colonial rule, and living in China as the People’s Republic of China was founded, Bunya’s work has come to embody the complexity of the deeply entangled history of this region. This is no country music grapples with lines of query around statelessness, borders, bodies, and lived experience. Wang’s methodological approach engages voice, vibration, and practices of listening combined with geological histories of natural disasters. Geological time offers a depth that requires a different comprehension of time, towards an immediate binary of human/non-human co-existence.

This project was commissioned by the Asian Art Biennial and Tokyo Theatre Commons. The first iteration of This is no country music was presented at Theatre Commons Tokyo (March 2019). An iteration of this project is also included as part of the Asian Art Biennial: The Strangers from beyond the Mountain and the Sea, Taichung City, Taiwan (2019).