Hong-Kai Wang (b.1971, Taiwan) is currently a practice-based Ph.D. candidate at the Academy of Fine Arts, Vienna. Wang’s research-based practice confronts the politics of knowledge lost in colonial and diasporic encounters at the intersection of lived experience, power, and ‘listening’. Through experimental modes of sonic sociality, her multidisciplinary work seeks to conceive of other time-spaces that critically interweave the production of desire, histories of labor, economies of co-habitation, and formations of knowledge.
Hazzeh, 2019
Hazzeh means ‘shaking’ or ‘quivering’ in Arabic and it also refers to an earthquake. Wang’s work powerfully contextualizes the tumultuous conflicts, the land that tectonically cracks and quivers under the heaviness of history. The almost forgotten, banned oral Palestinian lament tradition of Nuwah is the means the artist decided to use to get in touch with Genet’s seismographic way of understanding the landscape around him in Jordan. She collaborated with young Palestinian and Jordanian women who had heard Nuwah only from the elderly. Wang recorded them singing and mourning together to cracks in rocks found in different spots across North Jordan and Palestine in an open rehearsal form. Within that time gap they collectively created and listened to the frequency of the response that echoed back from the land. Hazzeh, therefore, is a sensual environment that weaves together a condensed act of asking, honoring, grieving and listening, as an attempt to communicate with a history that is cut away from the world.