The Unusual Energy
On May 17 2025, I performed. I sat with two goldfishes, surrounded by a table full of objects. My goal? To make the fish speak. As I gazed at them, the air conditioner's hum filled my ears, and I became acutely aware of the countless eyes fixed on me. The audience sat so still and serious—why were they behaving so robotically? It wasn’t like the usual chatter and body interactions you’d expect in a gathering. It is the smell of this unusual energy! I found myself asking, “Why have I arranged 20 minutes for myself to do whatever I want?”
In usual sound performances, the audiences often sit in silence, unsmiling, with an air of seriousness. The stillness seemed surreal to me, almost absurd. I wanted to laugh. Would laughing make me a strange person? What if I suddenly jump or scream—how would they react? It struck me as both a hilarious and helpless situation: this unusual energy we have, to self-determine and manipulate fragmented sounds, creates personal timelines within the broader framework of secular time. This tendency in sound performances—this mingling of daily modus operandi (日常) with self-indulgence—is an unusual fashion liberating in its absurdity. Suddenly, I had an idea. I yelled at the fish: “Have you had dinner yet?” (你今日食左飯未？). Then, I jumped off the floor, landing with a thud. Worried that the fish hadn’t heard me clearly, I repeated the phrase, emphasizing each word with a leap: “Have. You. Had. Dinner. Yet?” At that moment, my mind whispered: “It feels so good to be normal. I’m not performing within a divorced scenario that traps me at a table, exchanging dishes.”
On May 14 2025, I attended Sonic Anchor 47: Interweaving Parallels, curated by Contemporary Musiking Hong Kong. Arriving five minutes late, the usher led me to the front row. The silent tension in the room was palpable; every breath and movement felt as though it might disrupt the delicate equilibrium in the performance. As I sat down, I became acutely aware of my own body. With its low backrest, the lightweight chair forced me into an unnaturally rigid posture. This physical discomfort mirrored the restrained energy of the room. To my left, performer Cheung Wai Yin was calmly setting up the pole dance stands, while Chu Chin Ching alternated between sitting and moving closer to Cheung with a phone to film his actions to be projected onto the projection screen behind them. The scene unfolded under bright lighting, heightening the intimacy of their dynamic. Chu exuded patience and focus, carefully zooming in on subtle movements of Cheung’s body, while Cheung approached his task with deliberate peculiarity. He appeared not to adapt to the expected physical logic of building the pole stands intentionally. For instance, his relaxed shoulders appeared to falter under the weight of the plates, yet amidst the rigid silence, he unusually maintained a delicate balance. When assembling the plates, the collision of the pieces of iron created some noises, yet Cheung used this unusual energy to suppress the natural release of the noise.
On the other hand, the two sound artists Sun Yizhou & Wong Wai Ching Liz were performing within the confines of a dimly lit table setting, evoking the atmosphere of a “divorce dinner” (inspired by my discussion with Gold Mountain). They consciously resisted the natural progression of time under secular regulation, instead of imposing a meticulous slowness. Sun ate a star-shaped biscuit by biting its horns in an unusually deliberate pattern and duration, while Wong passed the dish and ate close to the microphone. She placed a bottle down to amplify the friction created by the objects, alongside the regular field recordings played through the radio. They tried to activate or utilise the objects in atypical ways, going against the objects’ original function. In doing so, they invited the audience accustomed to being navigated within the confines of secular timelines into their sacred artistic realm, one that regulated intimacy in a sense of time within a public framework.
Their unusual performative energy also evoked the tradition of normative spaces—like white cubes, theaters, schools, clinics, and jails. Wong attempted to subvert the norm by capturing Sun’s eating with flash photography, a gesture that signified a desire to break free from confinement as it is unusual for sound artists to do that because flash lights may be unrelated to sound. However, her partner remained unresponsive, suggesting a portrayal of atypical interactions between neurodivergent individuals. The absence of conversing, coughing, stumbling, sudden entrances, movements, or standing highlighted the strategy of elimination. This brought to mind the work of the classic Taiwanese performance artist Tehching Hsieh, particularly his first One Year Performance piece, which was accessible to the audience 19 times over a year. Regardless of whether the observers were engaged with him inside the cage, Hsieh maintained in isolation, refusing to interact directly or with eye contact. When the audience entered this sacred space, they found themselves subconsciously absorbed (or even rejected) into the artwork's mechanistic structure, restrained from moving freely, or disrupting the artist and the cage.
Returning to the table scene of the Sonic Anchor performance, this system of "inclusive exclusion" —an accessible situation in which intimacy was self-regulated. Within this framework, audience members could only navigate within the prescribed limits of ocularcentrism, often by merely looking around. Concurrently, collaborators Chu and Cheung initiated a new task centered around intimacy and skincare. Gradually disrobing, they exchanged tender smiles and engaged in a subtle interaction that contradicted the wild openness typically associated with pole dancing, applying lotion to each other's bodies. Their hands went through fingers, toes, and shoulders meticulously; their actions stood in stark contrast to Sun's rather careless modus operandi, where he shared chips with the audience while leaving Wong in the shadows. Sun’s action not only satisfied the modern cultural expectation for transparency and facilitated the management of the performance scheduling but also simultaneously excluded the audience by allowing the natural interplay between their serial behaviors and self-determined sequential actions— demanded that the audience adopt a posture of mundane passivity, a humble submission to everydayness, which highlighted both his sense of difference and the spectators’ otherness. By weaving this otherness into their tasks, this pair retained the "texture of artistic behavior" through a counter-everydayness that subtly deviated from the audience’s normalized state.
In both works, “inclusive exclusion” functions as a mode of temporal governance: the audience is granted access to the performance’s spatial and sensory frame yet denied the capacity to intervene in its unfolding time. For Cage, this governance is exercised through a procedural, stopwatch-driven inclusivity that paradoxically excludes the irregularities of lived duration, enforcing a flat, linear temporality. For Sonic Anchor 47, the same logic is reframed as an affective and relational structure—the inclusion of viewers into an intimate sphere coexists with their exclusion from altering its pace or rhythm. Crucially, this temporal governance is also where the performance’s “unusual energy” crystallises. Such energy is not mere eccentricity or spectacle; it is an emergent property of the deliberate friction between temporal restraint and perceptual intensity, between formal containment and sensory overflow. It arises when mundane gestures—biting a biscuit horn-by-horn, applying lotion in silence—are infused with a precision that amplifies their absurdity, much like Cage’s watering of flowers becomes uncanny under the stopwatch’s gaze. Chronobiologically, this unusual energy unsettles the audience’s entrainment to social time, producing micro-shocks that momentarily disalign internal rhythms from the collective beat. Phenomenologically, it generates a heightened awareness of one’s observational posture, a self-consciousness that folds the spectator’s experience back into the work’s structure. This reconfiguration shifts the politics of serialism from formalist control to a nuanced regulation of presence and perception, recalling Bergson’s insistence on durée as qualitative multiplicity, Merleau-Ponty’s understanding of embodied temporality, and Crary’s critique of how modernity disciplines attention and time. Such a framing suggests that the most potent contemporary serialisms—and their attendant unusual energies—might emerge not merely from the exhaustive management of time, but from the deliberate crafting of temporal conditions in which multiplicity, absurdity, and perceptual disalignment can quietly persist.
Across these performances, the "unusual energy" manifests as a disruption of the expected flow of time, behavior, and interaction. It is an energy that emerges from controlled restraints, absurdity with deliberation, and subtle contradictions. The two works revealed how performance time is not neutral but charged: an intensive time without delay, produced by serial actions, improvisations, and interruptions. These moments oscillate between open and closed systems, between inclusion and exclusion, depending on how the artist negotiates internal intention and external reception. What emerged was less a conversation with audiences than an experiment in listening, belief, and silent authority. Whether it’s the suppression of the natural sounds, the mundanity of repetitive actions, or the tension between intimacy and exclusion, this energy challenges the audience to reconsider their role as passive observers. The “unusual energy” is, in some ways, objective, scientific, and arguably a democratic approach that strives to connect everything through sound. It can be seen as nothing more than a heap of intellectual normalization, modern (calm) aesthetic strategies, and de-individualized bureaucratic formulas in the development of conceptual art. Even those works I once had misinterpreted as improvisational, purposeless, and intuitive may belong to a manipulatively monotonous and repetitive style.
After all, what does this unusual energy reveal about contemporary art’s relationship with everydayness? Does it reflect on the alienation of modern life, or does it offer a space for liberation? May the sacred realm of the artist truly include the audience, or does it reinforce the boundary between the creator and spectator? These questions remain open for interpretation, leaving both the audience and artists to navigate the delicate balance between the usual and the unusual.
