Curatorial Text

 

Principally because the Chinese word for bat, ‘fú’, is a homophone for the word for fortune, bats within Chinese mythology hold symbolic resonance as beings of good luck and prosperity. Likewise, the word for clothing, fu, shares the same pronunciation as the word for luck. In Daoist divinatory practices, widely used talismans, created by priests called fulu, feature wordless incantatory markings on blocks of parchment, intended as a charm to protect against evil. The ‘fu’ in fulu is understood as a set of scripts, scores, or recipes for focusing on positive vitalities and navigating away from unwanted spirits. These various connective threads to ‘fu’ inform the title of the exhibit and underpin the assortment of sculptural objects and the sound installation that encompasses it. Repeated five times, fu holds an even more auspicious meaning: wu fu or the five blessings, including longevity, wealth, health and composure, love of virtue, and peaceful death. The title sculptural piece in the exhibit, suspended from the gallery ceiling, is an exuberant presence interpreting the symbol of the bat (fu). Primarily illustrating a bat form, it is also designed with a kite in mind, as well as a wearable garment with references to fulu writings in reverse appliqué on the surface. It typifies the multivalent essence of the exhibit on the whole and the objects contained within it, so that there’s always more than a singular possibility readily legible. 

 

The piece, listener, is a connotative portrait of the artist with a cast of their ears in wax affixed to a door handle and then to a threshold beyond a space that is otherwise limited to their perception. Appropriately, the suffix of their name, ‘Wen’, means to listen, and the depiction of the name through Chinese characters is of an ear between doors. The artist considers this closed threshold against which they listen to be of the realm of the feminine voice. Referencing Anne Carson in the Gender of Sound, it is a realm stifled by a patriarchal order.

 

The piece also explores correlations between wax as a material for absorbing sound waves in sound recording, such as wax cylinders, and wax as a protective substance and, therefore, talismanic for the ear and, by extension, the body. This talismanic positioning of wax is extended through another piece, fulu 服籙, which consists of four bodices in the artist’s size, cast in solid wax with references to the fulu wordless markings inscribed on them. Again, here, the wax acts as a protective material both for the garment object and the divinatory writings it holds.  

 

Lin interweaves their family within this larger constellation of significations coursing throughout the exhibit. There’s a family portrait where Lin’s five-member nuclear family unit, dressed to the nines, holds up blue popsicles to the camera, all in deadpan. The portrait is inverted, much like the way a family of bats holds itself up when at rest. Because it is a group of five, a correlation is made with wu fu, or the five bats of luck. The portrait is complete with popsicle sticks strewn on and below it. The sticks have a coat of red at their ends, making them resemble fortune sticks (Qiu Qian) found in temples. Some of the sticks are inserted in moon blocks or jiaobei, another divinatory tool used to seek divine guidance through a form of yes or no question. 

 

Connecting back to the artist’s own body, the sculptural work 'trogloxene', affixed discreetly to a top corner of the gallery, depicts a medical scan of the sinus cavity, which the artist has painted black, taking on a bat-like form. This is an air-filled space in the human skull through which the voice is given resonance as air vibrates, affecting one’s vocal quality. 

 

The piece is informed by the notion of voice confrontation, a common psychological phenomenon of disliking the sound of one’s own recorded voice due to striking disparities between what others hear and what you hear of your own voice. In a way, it is a site where the sound of one’s perceived gender emerges and typifies the enduring discrepancies between one’s own experience of the self and the external world’s reception of it. This is especially pertinent for Lin, a diasporic transfeminine person, confronted with navigating a social world of binaries. Extending the ideas in trogloxene, the basement installation, heat from fire, fire from heat shows Lin confronting their voice by moulding it through voice feminization exercises. 

 

Bathed in red light, a colour less sensitive to bat vision, the installation 'heat from fire, fire from heat' features a network of sixty-four sculptural speakers made to mimic a colony of bats perched upside down in a cavern. Through the four-channel audio installation, chatter-like sounds within the colony flit and reverberate throughout the space. The raw material of the sound itself consists of various samples of the artist feminizing their voice through online voice feminization tutorials to ultimately gain new vocal habits of speaking. This feminized voice is achieved through the practice of increasing their pitch and modulating vocal weight and resonance forward toward a light quality. The lighter the quality of the voice, the more feminized; however, there reaches a threshold at which this perceived feminized sound escapes the generally expected sound of the female voice. This is the boundary the artist seeks to transcend. It transcends the binaries of the recognizable male or female voice and into one of their own. With their raw vocal samples, Lin fiddles with their pitch in an audio editing software so that it merges with something akin to that of an echolocating bat, the sound of which, because of its ultrasonic frequencies, exceeds the range of human hearing. As such, what we do perceive through this sound installation is but an approximation.

 

Throughout the exhibit, the artist continues to suggest interstices beyond the immediately available physical world, offering a consideration for an attunement toward realms in between, as well as those outside any sensory perception. All this striving away from a given world can, in some ways, be regarded as a form of refusal of the given; however, it only surfaces queries around the conditions and strictures bounding the very prefigured world that assumes one’s acquiescence.