8-channel sounds installation, wood constructions | dimensions variable

Initiated through the artist’s research into the traditional singing practices of the Tao people (also known as Yami), an Indigenous community native to Lanyu Island in Taiwan, The Chant is a poetic spatial sound composition that explores the auditory dimensions of memory while engaging with the island’s complex political history under post-war Taiwanese military administration, particularly the former Lanyu Farm (1958–1990), a network of correctional labor camps established across the island.

Created in collaboration with Tao music researcher, activist, and singer Syapen Panoyuen (Chien-Ping Kuo), the composition examines how experiences of political violence and social rupture continue to resonate through individual and collective memory. Rather than recounting historical events directly, The Chant approaches history through listening, tracing echoes, absences, and emotional residues embedded in sound. Tao singing, traditionally a means of transmitting knowledge and lived experience across generations, becomes a vessel through which memories are recalled, transformed, and shared.

Through its poetic sonic language, the project reflects on the political and affective power of listening, and on the ways histories continue to reverberate through voice, song, and auditory memory. The work forms part of Songs of Oblivion, Hui Ye’s long-term artistic research into listening, memory, and the sonic afterlives of political history.

This slideshow requires JavaScript.

Image 1-3: Exhibition view, One Was Ashore, A Thousand Channels, Times Museum Guangdong. Courtesy of the artists