Testimonial Loudspeakers

Public art involving interactive installation, sound, performance and writing.

I installed a coat hanger full of loud speakers in the center of a major crossroad in the suburb I live in in Beijing. Each speaker repeats a different strange dream about death I had during a very depressive period. A handful of people stopped to watch. At the end, a traffic police came over to talk to me, worrying that it was some sort of propaganda against the Chinese Communist government. A delivery guy, in waiting for a red light, insisted on giving me two oranges, commenting that I looked freezing.

People in my suburb are generally not familiar with contemporary art. Their memory of loud speakers are tied to propaganda or group activities that take up the public sphere, which are major remaining characteristics that still exist today and can be traced to the Maoist era. This crossroad under construction is part of the nonstop town renovations that have taken place ever since I could remember.

Collective morals of a formerly disadvantaged nation proudly working hard toward quality life shaped a pragmatic conformism in the culture. My playful and humorous attempt to place a personal narrative about disorder in a seemingly prospering society that appears to follow perfect order is almost anarchical.

Here are a few “testimonies”/my weird dreams repeated by the speakers:

I heard something scratching in my wardrobe. I took a fruit knife, lit a candle, approached it. I flung open the door. Two girls were smooching inside. However to my shock their facial features were exact replicas of mine. “I am going to call the police!” I exclaimed, terrified.

“I am half sick of shadows!” One revealed her teeth like an animal. The other sobbed violently.

The web was woven curiously,The charm is broken utterly—The moment their eyes met mine through the closet mirror, it cracked from side to side.

I dreamed that someone was killing me with a very badly made tool. In fact, the device was so malfunctioning that my murderer kept apologizing, he said ”Sorry. Just a minute… Almost done. Almost.”

As I watched him struggle with the device, he gave me an old flip phone to call someone and leave my last words. He said he started being a murderer in the epoch of flip phones. He also mentioned the phone plan was “pay as you go.”

I dialed my mom’s number and said: “Mom, all my life and career I had never been able to tell realism from surrealism…”

I bought a pet lizard as long and thick as my arm. I kept it confined to a corner of my bed. One night when I awoke from a bad dream however, I noticed a yellow liquid starting to drip out of its mouth, very slowly, bright oily drops. I was so exhausted from my bad dream that I fell back asleep again. In that dream, the dripping quickened, and the yellow drops slowly turned to brown, then red. The lizard was upright against the wall vertically, writhing in agony. I woke to see a last exertion of thick red liquid before the it limped and collapsed…Then I fell asleep again, my face close to the puddle. I remember being disgusted but paralyzed that I couldn’t move. The whole time I was thinking about how to clean up. Then I woke.

Grief is an obedient beast. It sat there quietly in the corner and watched me all day. When I sit down to write, it waits for me like a cup of water on the desk. It is a prison that only survives know about, where the whip on a body might sound like the pulling down of a wall. In some dreams it seeps in under the door, or scratches under the carpet, or it is a brimming bath… Well I could go on.