As a special closing program for Michele Chu’s solo exhibition gasp, Gold Mountain and stephanie mei huang each respond through sound and live performance to the exhibition’s explorations of grief, loss, and embodied experience. Drawing on their own lived experiences and relationships with Chu, the two artists bring personal memory, intimate relationships, and sonic practices into the exhibition space. From reclaiming a sense of self and presence in the aftermath of trauma and loss, to reweaving care, companionship, and remembrance through a friendship spanning decades, sound becomes a means of reaching into the past, inhabiting the present, and reconnecting with oneself and others.

The two performances carry the questions opened up by the exhibition into another moment: after a farewell, how do we live with experiences that continue to reverberate through the body and memory? And amid loss, how might we rebuild our connections to ourselves, to others, and to the present?

Reclamation / Six Months Later

Perform as a direct site-specific response to Michele Chu’s exhibition on grief, Reclamation / Six Months Later is a live sound and vocal experiment that structures a personal archive of relational trauma into an unvarnished dual-microphone performance. Navigating between a conversational baseline in non-fluent Mandarin and live freestyle rap over a layered background landscape of personal finalities, Gold Mountain utilizes the installation's physical materials and strips away all technical safety nets to investigate whether a voice and an identity can truly return to the present moment.

volume lullaby

volume lullaby is a lullaby response to artist Michele Chu by her friend and fellow artist stephanie mei huang (with sound support by Peng Peng). In an ekphrastic dialogue with Chu’s gravestone lullaby i-iv, huang presents a sonic and durational gesture of care, maintenance, and remembering that quite literally interweaves their decades-long entwined histories and topographies.

About the Performer: Gold Mountain

Lei Mengru is a writer and Master of Criminal Justice from Macau University of Science and Technology. Her prose is mainly published in Youth Observation magazine and included in the Anthology of Macau Writers. She attempts to hone her litigation skills through the reading of detective novels.

 

About the Performer: stephanie mei 玫 huang

Lei Mengru is a writer and Master of Criminal Justice from Macau University of Science and Technology. Her prose is mainly published in Youth Observation magazine and included in the Anthology of Macau Writers. She attempts to hone her litigation skills through the reading of detective novels.